On Literature

THE POWER OF FALSEHOOD

In his Quaestio QuodlibetalisXII. 14, Saint Thomas Aquinas replies to the question "Utrum Veritas sit fortior inter vinum et regem et mulierem," in other words, whether the power of truth is more potent, more persuasive, and more constricting than the authority of a king, the influence of wine, or the fascination of a woman.

The reply given by Aquinas—who respected the king, did not disdain, I believe, the odd glass of good wine at his table, and had proved that he could resist the temptations of women by chasing with a burning brand the naked courtesan whom his brothers had introduced into his bedroom to persuade him to become a Benedictine and not dishonor the family by donning the mendicant habit of the Dominicans—was, as usual, subtle and complex: wine, rulers, women, and truth are not comparable because "non sunt unius generis' (they are not of one genus). But if one considers them "per comparationem ad aliquem effectum (by comparing them in their effects), they all can move the human heart to some course of action. Wine acts on our corporeal aspect, "quod facitper temulentiam loqui" (since it makes us speak through drink), while our animal-sensitive nature can be swayed by "delectatio venerea' (erotic pleasure), or in other words by a woman (Thomas could not conceive of sexual impulses on the other side that could legitimately move a woman, but we cannot expect Thomas to be Heloise). As for the practical intellect, it is obvious that the king's wishes, or the rule of law, has power over it. But the only force that moves the speculative intellect is truth. And since " vires corporales subiciuntur viribus animalibus, vires animales intellectualibus, et intellectuales practicae speculativis ... ideo simpliciter Veritas dignior est et excellentior et fortior' (bodily power is subject to animal powers, and our animal powers are inferior to intellectual strength, and practical intellectual strength is second to speculative intellectual power ... then it is clear that truth is worthier, more excellent, and stronger).

Such then is the power of truth. But experience teaches us that truth often takes a long time to prevail, and the acceptance of truth costs blood and tears. Might it not happen that something dubious shows similar force, whereby it would be legitimate to talk of the power of the falsehood?

To show that the falsehood (not necessarily in the form of a lie, but certainly in the form of an error) has been the engine behind many historical events, I would have to appeal to a criterion of truth. But if I chose this in too dogmatic a manner, my discourse would run the risk of ending the very moment it began.

If one maintained that all myths, all revelations in every religion, were nothing but lies, then, since belief in gods, of whatever kind, has shaped human history, we could only conclude that we have been living for millennia under the rule of falsehood.

However, we would then be guilty not only of banal euhemerism: the fact is that this same skeptical argument would appear singularly related to its opposite argument about the importance of faith. If you believe in any revealed religion, you have to admit that if Christ is the Son of God, then he is not the Messiah that Jerusalem is still waiting for, and if Mohammed is Allah's prophet, then it is an error to make sacrifices to the Plumed Serpent. If you are a follower of the most enlightened and indulgent theism, ready to believe at the same time in the Communion of Saints and the Great Wheel of the Tao, then you will reject as the fruit of error the massacre of infidels and heretics. If you are a worshipper of Satan, you will think the Sermon on the Mount puerile. If you are a radical atheist, no faith will be anything but a mistake. Consequently, since in the course of history many have acted in the belief of something that someone else did not believe in, we are obliged to admit that for each of us, in different measure, History has been largely a Theater of Illusions.

Let us stick, then, to a less contentious notion of truth and falsehood, even though it is philosophically contestable—but we all know that if we listened to philosophers everything would be contested, and we would never get anywhere. Let us stick to the criterion of scientific or historical truth that has been accepted by Western culture; in other words, to the criterion whereby we all accept that Julius Caesar was killed on the Ides of March, that on 20 September 1870 the troops of the young kingdom of Savoy entered Rome by the breach of Porta Pia, that sulphuric acid is H₂SO₄, or that the dolphin is a mammal.

Naturally each of these notions is liable to revision on the basis of new discoveries: but for the time being they are recorded in the Encyclopedia, and until proved otherwise we believe it to be a factual truth that the chemical composition of water is H₂O (and some philosophers believe that this truth must hold true in all possible worlds).

At this point we can say that in the course of history it has been the case that credit has been given to beliefs and assertions that today's Encyclopedia says are factually false; and such credit as to conquer the wise, cause the birth and collapse of empires, inspire poets (who are not always witnesses to truth), push human beings to heroic sacrifices, intolerance, massacres, or the search for truth. If that is so, how can we not assert that the power of falsehood exists?

The almost canonical example is that of Ptolemy's hypothesis. Today we know that for centuries humanity accepted a false representation of the universe. It tried all possible tricks to make good the falsity of the image, it invented epicycles and deferents, in the end it tried with Tycho Brahe to have all the planets move around the sun provided that it continued to move around the earth. It was on the basis of this image that not just Dante Alighieri acted, which is not significant, but also the Phoenician navigators, Saint Brendan, Erik the Red, and Christopher Columbus (and one of the above was the first to reach America). Moreover, but on the basis of a false hypothesis, man managed to divide up the globe into parallels and meridian degrees, as we still do, only changing the first meridian from the Canaries to Greenwich.

The example of Ptolemy, which by association triggers the memory of Galileo's unfortunate story, seems deliberately created to lead one to think that my history of falsehood and its power, in its secular boldness, only concerns cases where a dogmatic thought has refused to accept the light of truth. But let us consider a story of the opposite hue, the story of another false opinion, patiently constructed by modern secular thinking to defame religious thought.

Try an experiment, and ask an ordinary person what Christopher Columbus was aiming to prove when he wanted to reach the East by sailing to the West, and what the learned men of Salamanca obstinately denied in order to stop his voyage. The reply, in most cases, will be that Columbus thought the earth was round, while the wise men of Salamanca held that it was flat and that after a short while the three caravels would plunge into the cosmic abyss.

Nineteenth-century lay thought, irritated by the fact that the church had not accepted the heliocentric hypothesis, attributed the idea that the earth was flat to the whole of Christian thought (patristic and scholastic). Nineteenth-century positivism and anticlericalism went to town with this cliché, which, as Jeffrey Burton Russell has shown, was reinforced during the battle fought by the supporters of Darwin's ideas against all forms of fundamentalism. ^* It was a question of proving that just as the churches had been wrong about the roundness of the earth, so they could be mistaken about the origin of species.

They then exploited the fact that a fourth-century Christian author like Lactantius (in his Institutiones Divinaé), who had no choice but to regard as correct many biblical passages in which the universe was described as being modeled on the Tabernacle, and therefore as a quadrangle, was opposed to pagan theories of the roundness of the earth, also because he could not accept the idea that the antipodes existed where men would have to walk with their heads upside down ...

Finally it was discovered that a sixth-century Byzantine geographer, Cosmas Indicopleustes, in his Topographia Christiana, had maintained that the cosmos was rectangular, with an arch that curved over the flat floor of the earth (once more the archetype was the Tabernacle). In an authoritative book, History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler by J. L. E. Dreyer, it was admitted that Cosmas was not an official representative of the church, but a lot of space was given to his theory.^† Although E. J. Dijksterhuis concedes in The Mechanization of the World Picture that Lactantius and Cosmas must not be considered representative of the scientific culture of the church fathers, he asserts that Cosmas's theory became the prevailing opinion for many centuries to come.^‡

The fact is that Lactantius was left to stew in his own juice by early and medieval Christian culture, and Cosmas's text, written in Greek, and therefore in a language that the medieval Christian had forgotten, was made known to the Western world only in 1706, in Montfaucon's Collectio Nova Patrum et Scriptorum Graecorum. No medieval author knew Cosmas, and he was regarded as an authority of the "dark ages" only after his work had been published in English in 1897!

Ptolemy knew, of course, that the earth was round; otherwise he would not have been able to divide it into 360 meridian degrees. Eratosthenes knew it as well, since in the third century B.C. he had calculated the length of the Equator in broadly accurate terms. In fact, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Eudoxus, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes all knew of it—and it turns out that the only people who did not believe it were two materialist philosophers, Leucippus and Democritus.

Macrobius and Martianus Capella were also well aware that the earth was round. As for the church fathers, they had to cope with the biblical text that mentioned the damned tabernacle shape, but Augustine, even though he did not hold strong opinions on the matter, knew the views of the ancients, and agreed that sacred scripture spoke in metaphors. His position is rather a different one, one quite common in Patristic thought: since it is not by knowing the shape of the earth that one's soul is saved, the question appeared to him to be of little interest. At a certain point Isidore of Seville (who was no model of scientific accuracy) calculates that the length of the equator was eighty thousand stadia. Could he have thought the earth was flat?

Even a first-year high-school student can easily deduce that if Dante enters the cone of Hell and comes out the other side to see unfamiliar stars at the foot of Mount Purgatory, this means that he knew perfectly well that the earth was round. But let's forget about Dante, since we tend to think he can do no wrong. The fact is that the same opinion was held by Origen and Ambrose, and in the Scholastic period many writers—such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, John of Holy-rood, Pierre d'Ailly, Giles of Rome, Nicole d'Oresme, and John Buridan, to name but a few—spoke and thought of the earth as spherical.

What, then, was the question at issue in Columbus's time? It was that the learned men of Salamanca had made more precise calculations than his, and believed that the totally spherical earth was bigger than our Genoese mariner thought, and therefore that he was mad to try to circumnavigate the globe and arrive in the East by sailing West. Columbus, though, inspired by sacred fire, and a good sailor, if a hopeless astronomer, thought the earth was smaller than it was. Naturally neither he nor the wise men of Salamanca suspected that another continent lay between Europe and Asia. So you see how complicated the question is, and how narrow are the bounds between truth and error, right and wrong. The doctors of Salamanca, though they were right, made a mistake; and Columbus, though wrong, pursued his error with determination and was right—through serendipity.

Yet have a look at Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.^* It is true that in these two thick volumes he aims to list all the cases where religious thought retarded the development of science, but since he is an informed man, he cannot conceal the fact that Augustine, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas knew very well that the earth was round. Nevertheless, he claims that in order to maintain this they had to fight against the dominant theological view. But the dominant theological view was represented precisely by Augustine, Albertus, and Aquinas, who consequently did not have to fight against anyone.

Once more it is Russell who reminds us that a serious work like that by F. S. Marvin, which appeared in 1921 in Studies in the History and in the Method of the Sciences, repeats that "[t]he maps of Ptolemy ... were forgotten in the West for a thousand years," ^* and that in a manual written in 1988 (A. Holt-Jensen, Geography: History and Concepts) it is claimed that the medieval church taught that the earth was a flat disk with Jerusalem at the center; and even Daniel Boorstin, in his popular Discoverers of 1983, states that from the fourth to the fourteenth century Christianity suppressed the notion that the earth was round.

How did the idea spread that the Middle Ages considered the earth a flat disk? We saw that Isidore of Seville calculated the length of the equator, yet in the actual manuscripts of his work there is a diagram that inspired many representations of our planet, the so-called T-map.

The structure of the T-map is very simple: Given that the circle represents the planet earth, three lines forming a T separate an upper semicircle from two lower quarter circles. The upper portion represents Asia, upper because according to legend the earthly paradise was in Asia; the horizontal bar represents on one side the Black Sea, on the other the Nile, while the vertical line represents the Mediterranean, so the quarter circle on the left is Europe, and the one on the right is Africa. All around is the large circle of the ocean.

Could it have been that these maps signified that the earth was a flat circle?

In a manuscript from the Liber Floridus by Lambert of Saint-Omer, from the twelfth century, the emperor holds a circle in his hand, on which is drawn a T-map. It is not by accident that this map appears as a regal symbol in the hands of an emperor. It has a symbolic rather than a geographical value. With a little bit of goodwill one could interpret it not as a circle but as the schematic representation of a terrestrial globe, as happens in other images.

However, the impression of a circle is given by the maps illustrating the commentaries on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana, a text written in the eighth century but which, illustrated by Mozarabic miniaturists in subsequent centuries, had a wide influence on the art in Romanesque abbeys and Gothic cathedrals, and T-maps are found in countless illuminated manuscripts.

How was it possible that people who believed that the earth was round made maps where what one saw was a flat earth? The first answer is that this is just what we also do. Criticizing the flatness of these maps would be like criticizing the flatness of one of today's atlases. This was simply a naive and conventional form of cartographic projection. However, there are other factors we have to bear in mind.

The Middle Ages was a period of great travels, but with the roads in disrepair, forests to traverse, and stretches of sea to cross relying on any sailor who was around, there was no chance of drawing adequate maps. They were purely schematic, like the Instructions for Pilgrims at Santiago de Compostela, and they said more or less: "If you want to go from Rome to Jerusalem proceed southward and then ask as you go along." Let us try to think of a railway map as found in any railway timetable that you buy from a newsstand. Nobody could extrapolate from that series of crisscrosses, which in themselves are clear enough if you want to take a train from Milan to Livorno (and realize that you have to go via Genoa), the exact shape of Italy. The exact shape of Italy is not of any interest to someone who has to go to the station.

The Romans had charted a series of roads connecting every city in the known world; these roads were represented in what is called Peutinger's map (named after the person who rediscovered it in the fifteenth century). The map shows with great precision every road of the time, but it places them roughly along two stretches of land, the upper one representing Europe and the lower one Africa, so that the Mediterranean appears as a little stream. We are in exactly the same position as with the railway timetable map. The shape of the continents is not of any interest, only the information that there is a road that allows you to go from Marseille to Genoa. And yet the Romans, from the Punic wars onward, had crisscrossed the Mediterranean and knew very well that it was not the little stream that was shown on the map.

For the rest, medieval journeys were imaginary. The Middle Ages produced encyclopedias, called Imagines Mundi, that tried more to satisfy the taste for marvels, telling of distant and inaccessible countries, and these were all from books written by people who had never seen the places they wrote about, since the force of tradition counted more than actual experience. Various maps of the world of the time aim not to represent the shape of the earth but to list the cities and peoples that could be seen there. Furthermore, symbolic representation counted more than empirical representation, and often what preoccupied the illuminator was putting Jerusalem at the center of the earth, not how to get to Jerusalem. Last point: medieval maps did not have any scientific function but met the demand for marvels that came from the public, I mean in the same way that today glossy magazines show us the existence of flying saucers and on TV they tell us that the Pyramids were built by an extraterrestrial civilization. Even in the Nuremberg Chronicle, which was actually written in 1493, or in Orteliuss atlases in the next century, maps represented mysterious monsters that were thought to inhabit those countries the maps themselves already showed in acceptable cartographic terms.

Perhaps the Middle Ages were cartographically naive, but many modern historians have been even more naive and have not known how to interpret their criteria for mapmaking.

Another fake that changed the history of the world? The Donation of Constantine. Nowadays, thanks to Lorenzo Valla, we know that the Constitutum was not authentic. And yet without the profound belief in that document's authenticity, European history would have run a different course: no investiture struggles, no struggle to the death for the Holy Roman Empire, no papal temporal power, but also no Sistine Chapel—which is painted after the Donation has been proved false, but it can be painted because it was believed to be authentic for centuries.

In the second half of the twelfth century a letter arrived in the West telling how in the Far East, beyond the areas occupied by the Muslims, beyond the lands that the Crusaders had tried to remove from the dominion of the infidels, but which had come back under Saracen control, there flourished a Christian kingdom, governed by the fabled Prester John, or Presbyter Johannes, " rex potentia et virtute dei et domini nostri Iesu Christi" (a king by the power and virtue of our lord Jesus Christ). The letter began by saying:

You must know and firmly believe that I, Prester John, am the lord of lords, and in all riches that exist under the heavens, in virtue and in power I outdo all the kings of the earth. Seventy-two kings pay us tribute. I am a devout Christian and I protect and support with alms everywhere true Christians governed by the sovereignty of my Clemency [...].

Our sovereignty extends to the three Indias: from India Major, where rests the body of Thomas the Apostle, our dominions extend toward the desert, pushing toward the borders of the Orient before bending back toward the West as far as deserted Babylon, beside the Tower of Babel [...] In our dominions there are born and live elephants, dromedaries, camels, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, [...] panthers, wild asses, white and red lions, bears, and white blackbirds, deaf cicadas, griffins, tigers, jackals, hyenas, wild bulls, centaurs, wild men, horned men, fauns, satyrs and their female equivalents, pygmies, cynocephali, giants forty cubits tall, one-eyed men, cyclops, a bird called the phoenix, and almost every kind of animal that lives under heavens vault [...] In one of our provinces there is a river called the Indus. This river, which flows from Paradise, extends its meandering course through different channels throughout the whole province and in it are found natural stones, emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls, amethysts, sardonyxes, and many other precious gems [...].

In the furthermost regions of our land [...] we have an island [...] where all year round, twice a week, God rains manna in great abundance, which is gathered and eaten by the peoples who live on no other food but this. For they do not plow, nor sow, nor reap, nor move the earth in any way to extract its richest fruit [...]. All these people, who live only on divine food, live for five hundred years. Yet when they reach the age of a hundred, they are rejuvenated and regain their strength by drinking thrice the water from a fountain which springs up at the root of a tree that grows in that place [...] None of those among us are liars [...] Among us there is no one who is an adulterer. No vice has any power with us.^*

Translated and paraphrased several times in the course of the following centuries (up until the seventeenth century), and existing in various languages and versions, the letter played a decisive role in the expansion of the Christian West toward the Orient. The notion that there could be a Christian kingdom beyond the Muslim territories legitimized all their expansionist and exploratory undertakings. Prester John would be spoken about by Giovanni Pian del Carpine, William of Rubrouck, and Marco Polo. Halfway through the fourteenth century Prester John's kingdom would move from a vague Orient to Ethiopia when Portuguese navigators began their African adventure. Contacts with Prester John would be attempted by Henry IV of England, the due du Berry, and Pope Eugenius IV. At Bologna, when Charles V was crowned, there would still be discussion of Prester John as a possible ally for the reconquest of the Holy Sepulchre.

How did Prester John's letter come about, and what was its aim? Perhaps it was a document of anti-Byzantine propaganda, produced in Frederick I's scriptoria, but the problem concerns not so much its origins (this period abounded in forgeries of all types)^* as its reception. This geographical fantasy served to bolster a political project. In other words, the ghost evoked by some scribe with a flair for forgeries (a highly prized literary genre at the time) acted as an alibi for the expansion of the Christian world toward Africa and Asia, and friendly support for the white man's burden.

Another invention that was rich in historical implications was that of the Rosicrucian confraternity. Many scholars have discussed the climate of extraordinary spiritual renewal that emerged at the dawn of the seventeenth century, when the idea of a Golden Century gathered pace. This climate of expectation pervaded both Catholic and Protestant areas in different forms (in an interplay of mutual influences): plans for ideal republics come forward—from Campanella's Città del sole to Johann Valentin Andrea es Christianopolis, as well as hopes of a universal monarchy and a general renewal of morals and religious sensibility—at the very time when Europe, in the period around the Thirty Years' War, was raging with national conflicts, religious hatreds, and the rise of raison d'état.

In 1614 a manifesto appeared, entitled Fama Fraternitatis R. C, in which the mysterious Rosicrucian confraternity revealed its existence, and gave notice of its own history and its mythical founder, Christian Rosencreutz—who had apparently lived in the fifteenth century and learned secret revelations from Arabic and Jewish sages in the course of his wanderings in the Orient. In 1615 there appeared, alongside the Fama, which was in German, a second manifesto, in Latin, Confessio Fraternitatis Roseae Crucis. Ad Eruditos Europae. The first manifesto hopes that there might arise in Europe too a society in possession of gold, silver, and jewels in abundance, which would distribute these to the kings to satisfy their needs and legitimate aims, a society that would teach the rulers to learn everything that God has allowed man to know and help them with their deliberations.

Amid alchemical metaphors and more or less messianic invocations, both manifestos insist on the secret nature of the confraternity and on the fact that their members cannot reveal its real nature ("our edifice—even though a hundred thousand people should see it—will be forever intangible, indestructible, and hidden from the sinful world"). Consequently, the final appeal of the Fama, to all the learned men of Europe, to make contact with those who had drawn up the manifesto, might appear even more ambiguous: "Even though we have not for the moment revealed our names, nor when we meet, nevertheless we will certainly get to know everyone's opinion, in whatever language it is expressed; and whoever makes his name known to us can confer with one of us either viva voce or, should there be some impediment to that, in writing."

Almost at once, people from all corners of Europe began to write appeals to the Rosicrucians. Nobody claimed to know them, no one said he was a Rosicrucian, everyone tried somehow to let it be understood that they were entirely in agreement with its program. Julius Sperber, Robert Fludd, and Michael Maier all speak to the invisible Rosicrucians: Maier, in his Themis Aurea (1618), maintains that the confraternity really does exist, even though he admits that he is too humble a person to have ever belonged to them. But as Frances Yates observed, the usual behavior of Rosicrucian writers was to claim not only that they were not Rosicrucians but that they had never even met a member of the confraternity.^*

For a start, Johann Valentin Andreae and all his friends in the Tübingen circle, who were immediately suspected of being the authors of the manifestos, spent their lives either denying the fact or playing it down as a literary game, a youthful folly. Moreover, not only is there no historical evidence of the existence of the Rosicrucians, but by definition there cannot be. Still today, the official documents of the AMORC ("Anticus et Mysticus Ordo Rosae Crucis, "whose temple, rich in Egyptian iconography, can be visited in San José, California) state that the original texts legitimizing the order certainly do exist but for obvious reasons will remain secret and locked up in inaccessible archives.

We are interested not so much in todays Rosicrucians, however, who are just part of folklore, as in the historical ones. From the earliest appearance of the first two manifestos critical pamphlets began to be published, attacking the confraternity with accusations of various kinds, in particular those of being forgers and charlatans. In 1623 there appeared in Paris anonymous notices announcing the arrival of the Rosicrucians in the city, and this announcement unleashed fierce polemics, in both Catholic and libertine circles; the common rumor that the Rosicrucians were devil worshippers was expressed in an anonymous Effroyables Pactions faites entre le diable et les prétendus invisibles (Terrifying Pacts Made between the Devil and the So-Called Invisible Ones), also of 1623. Even Descartes, who during a journey to Germany had tried—it is said—to contact them (unsuccessfully, of course), was suspected on his return to Paris of belonging to the confraternity, and he got out of the predicament with a masterstroke: since the common legend had it that the Rosicrucians were invisible, he made his appearance at many public occasions and thus defused the rumors that surrounded him, according to Baillet in his Vie de Monsieur Descartes. A certain Neuhaus published, first in German, then in French in 1623, an Advertissement pieux et utile des frères de la Rose-Croix (Pious and Useful Advertisement of the Brothers of the Rosy-Cross), which asked if there were any Rosicrucians, who they were, where they took their name from, and why they revealed themselves to the public; and it concluded with the extraordinary argument that "since they change and turn their names into anagrams, and conceal their age, and come here without revealing their identity, there is no Logician who can deny that they must of necessity exist."

This tells us that it only required someone to make an appeal for the spiritual reform of humanity for the most paradoxical reactions to be unleashed, as though everyone were waiting for some decisive event.

Jorge Luis Borges, in his '"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," writes of an improbable country, described in an unfindable encyclopedia. From the researches into this country it emerges, through vague clues based on texts that plagiarize each other, that in fact what is being talked about is an entire planet, "with its own architectures and wars, with the terror of its mythologies and the sound of its languages, with its emperors and seas, its minerals and birds, its fishes, its algebra and its fire, and its theological and metaphysical controversies." This entity is the creation of "a secret society of astronomers, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, moralists, painters, geometers ... under the guidance of an obscure man of genius."

We are here faced with a typical Borges invention: the invention of an invention. Yet Borges's readers know that he never invented anything; his most improbable stories come from his rereading of history. In fact, at a certain point Borges says that one of his sources was a work by Johann Valentin Andreae, which (though Borges got this information secondhand from De Quincey) "described the imaginary community of the Rosicrucians; a community that others later genuinely founded from the example of what he had imagined."

In fact the Rosicrucian story produced historical developments of considerable significance. Symbolic Masonry, a transformation of actual masonry (which had real confraternities of artisans, who had preserved over the course of the centuries the terms and ceremonies of the ancient builders of cathedrals), emerges in the eighteenth century thanks to some English gentlemen. With Andersons Constitutions, symbolic Masonry tried to legitimize itself by maintaining the antiquity of its origins, which they claimed went back to the Temple of Solomon. In subsequent years, through the efforts of Ramsay, who created so-called Scottish Masonry, what is worked into this foundation myth is the relationship between the builders of the Temple and the Templars, whose secret tradition apparently reaches modern Masonry through the mediation of the Rosicrucians.

If in early Masonry the Rosicrucian theme introduces elements of mysticism and the occult into an organization that is by now a rival to throne and altar, at the beginning of the nineteenth century it will be in defense of throne and altar that the Rosicrucian and Templar myth will be taken up again in order to combat the spirit of the Enlightenment.

Already before the French Revolution people discussed the myth of secret societies and the fact that there existed Unknown Superiors who guided the destiny of the world. In 1789 the marquis de Luchet (in his Essai sur le secte des Illuminés) warned: "in the bosom of the thickest darkness a society of new beings has been formed, who know each other without ever having been seen.... This society takes from the Jesuit rule its blind obedience, from Masonry its trials and external ceremonies, and from the Templars its subterranean echoes and incredible daring."

Between 1789 and 1798, as a response to the French Revolution, the Abbé Barruel wrote his Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de jacobinisme, apparently a historical work but one that could however be read as a serial novel. After being destroyed by Philippe le Bel, the Templars turned into a secret society to destroy the monarchy and the papacy. In the eighteenth century they got hold of Masonry to create a sort of academy whose diabolical members included Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Diderot, and D'Alembert—and it was from this group that Jacobinism was born. But the Jacobins themselves were in turn controlled by an even more secret society, the Bavarian Illuminati, who were regicides by vocation. The French Revolution was the final outcome of this conspiracy.

It did not matter that there were profound differences between secular, enlightened Masonry and the Masonry of the Illuminati, which was occultist and related to the Templars, nor that the Templar myth had already been exploded by one of its brothers and fellow travelers, who would later take another road: I am referring to Joseph de Maistre.... No, it did not matter, it was too good a story.

Barruel's book contained no reference to the Jews. But in 1806 Barruel received a letter from a certain Captain Simonini, who reminded him that both the Mani and the Old Man of the Mountains of Muslim memory (the Templars were suspected of being in league with the latter) were Jews (and you can see that here the network of occult ancestry becomes dizzying). Masonry then had been founded by the Jews, who had infiltrated all secret societies.

Barruel did not take up this rumor publicly, and in any case it did not produce any interesting effects until the middle of the century, when the Jesuits began to worry about the anticlerical originators of the Risorgimento, such as Garibaldi, who were affiliated with Masonry. The idea of showing that the Carbonari were emissaries of a Judeo-Masonic plot appeared to be useful as a polemic.

But still in the nineteenth century, the anticlerical supporters in turn tried to defame the Jesuits, to show that the latter were doing nothing other than plotting against the good of humanity. More than some "serious" authors (from Michelet and Quinet to Garibaldi and Gioberti), the writer who made this motif popular was a novelist, Eugène Sue. In The Wandering Jew, the evil Monsieur Rodin, the quintessence of Jesuit skulduggery, clearly appears as a replica of the Unknown Superiors of both Masonic and clerical memory. Monsieur Rodin reappears on the scene in Sue's last novel, The Mysteries of the People, where the notorious Jesuit plot is exposed down to the last detail. Rudolph of Gerolstein, who has migrated from The Mysteries of Paris to this novel, denounces the Jesuit plot, warning "with what cunning this infernal plot has been organized, and what terrifying outrages, what horrendous slavery, what despotic destiny it meant for Europe...."

After Sue's novels came out, a certain Monsieur Joly wrote a pamphlet of liberal inspiration in 1864, directed against Napoléon III: in it Machiavelli, who stands for the cynical dictator, converses with Montesquieu. The Jesuit plot described by Sue is now attributed by Joly to Napoléon III.

In 1868 Hermann Goedsche, who had published other clearly libelous pamphlets, wrote a popular novel, Biarritz, under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe, in which he describes an occult ceremony in the cemetery in Prague. Goedsche is simply copying a scene from Dumas's Joseph Balsamo (1849), which describes the meeting between Cagliostro, head of the Unknown Superiors, and other Illuminati, when they are all plotting the affair of the Queen's necklace. But instead of Cagliostro and company, Goedsche has representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel appear at a meeting, as they prepare to take over the world. Five years later the same story will be taken up in a Russian work ( The Jews, Masters of the World), where it is treated as if it were real history. In 1881 Le Contemporain reprints the same story, claiming that it comes from a reliable source, the English diplomat Sir John Readcliff. In 1896 François Bournand uses the story of the Grand Rabbi again (but this time he is called John Readcliff) in his book Les Juifs, nos contemporains. From this point onward, the Masonic meeting invented by Dumas, blended with the Jesuit plot invented by Sue and attributed by Joly to Napoléon III, becomes the real speech made by the Great Rabbi, which then resurfaces in various forms and in various places.

There now comes on the scene Pëter Ivanovic Rakovskij, a Russian already suspected of contacts with groups of revolutionaries and nihilists, who later (having duly repented of his past) would become involved with the Black Centurions, a terrorist organization of the extreme Right, and then turn informer before becoming head of the czar's political police (the Okhrana). Now Rakovskij, to help his political protector (Count Sergej Witte), who had been worried by an opponent of his, Elie de Cyon, had Cyon's house searched and found a pamphlet in which Cyon had copied Joly's text against Napoléon III, but attributed Machiavelli's ideas to Witte. Rakovskij, fiercely anti-Semitic—this was happening at the time of the Dreyfus affair—takes that text, cancels all references to Witte, and attributes the ideas to the Jews. One cannot be called Cyon, even with a C (rather than an'S), without evoking a Jewish conspiracy.

The text altered by Rakovskij probably constituted the primary source for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It betrays its novelistic source since it is not really credible, except in a novel by Sue, that the "baddies" should express their wicked plans in such an open and shameless way. The Elders openly declare that they have "a vaulting ambition, an all-consuming greed, a ruthless desire for revenge and an intense hatred." They want to abolish the freedom of the press but encourage libertinism. They criticize Liberalism but uphold the idea of capitalist multinationals. To stir up revolution in every country, they intend to exacerbate social inequalities. They want to build subways so as to bomb big cities. They want to abolish the study of the classics and ancient history but to encourage sport and visual communication in order to turn the working classes into imbeciles...

It was easy to identify a document produced in nineteenth-century France in the Protocols, because it abounds in references to problems in French society at the time, but it was also easy to spot many very famous popular novels among its sources. Alas, the story—once more—was so convincing in narrative terms that it was taken seriously.

The rest of this story is History. An itinerant monk, Sergej Nilus, in order to further his "Rasputinian" ambitions, and obsessed with the Antichrist, printed and commented on the Protocols. After this the text travels across Europe until it comes into Hitlers hands....^*

We have explored some false ideas that have made history, and about which everyone has more or less heard. But there are other crazed ideas we have forgotten about.

From 1925 onward publicity was given in Nazi circles to the theory of an Austrian pseudoscientist, Hans Hörbiger, a theory called WEL, that is, Welteislehre, the theory of eternal ice. It had enjoyed the favor of men such as Rosenberg and Himmler. But with Hitler's rise to power Hörbiger was taken seriously even in some scientific circles—for instance, by a scholar like Lenard, who had discovered x-rays along with Roentgen.

According to the theory of eternal ice (expounded as early as 1913 by Philip Fauth in his Glacial-Kosmogonié), the cosmos is the theater of an eternal struggle between ice and fire, which produces not an evolution but an alternation of cycles, or of epochs.^* There was once an enormous mass at a very high temperature, millions of times bigger than the sun, which collided with an immense accumulation of cosmic ice. The mass of ice penetrated this incandescent body, and after working inside it as vapor for hundreds of millions of years, it caused the whole thing to explode. Various fragments were projected both into icy space and into an intermediate zone where they became the solar system. The moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are made of ice, and the Milky Way is a chain of ice that traditional astronomy has viewed as stars; but in fact these are photographic tricks. Sunspots are produced by blocks of ice detaching themselves from Jupiter.

Now the force of the original explosion is decreasing, and every planet completes not an elliptical revolution, as official science erroneously believes, but something approximating an (imperceptible) spiral around the bigger planet that attracts it. At the end of the cycle through which we are living, the moon will come closer and closer to the earth, gradually making the waters of the oceans rise, submerging the tropics, and allowing only the tallest mountains to emerge, while the cosmic rays will become more and more powerful and cause genetic mutations. Finally the moon will explode, turning into a mixture of ice, water, and gas, which in the end will plummet down onto the earth's globe. Because of complicated events due to the influence of Mars, the earth too will turn into a sphere of ice and in the end will be reabsorbed by the sun. Then there will be a new explosion and a new beginning, just as in the past the earth had already had and then reabsorbed another three satellites.

This cosmogony presupposed a sort of Eternal Return that went back to very ancient myths and epics. Once more, what today's Nazis call the wisdom of Tradition was in this way set up against the false knowledge of liberal Jewish science. Furthermore, a glacial cosmogony seemed very Nordic and Aryan. In The Morning of the Magicians Pauwels and Bergier attribute to this profound belief in the glacial origins of the cosmos the confidence, encouraged by Hitler, that his troops would be able to cope very well in the frosts of Russian territory.^* But they also maintain that the need to prove how cosmic ice would react had slowed down the experiments on the V-1s. Still in 1952, a certain Elmar Brugg published a book in honor of Hörbiger, whom he hailed as the twentieth-century Copernicus, claiming that the theory of eternal ice explained the profound links between earthly events and cosmic forces, and concluding that the silence of democratic-Jewish science about Hörbiger was a typical example of the conspiracy of mediocrities.

The cultivators of magical-Hermetic and neo-Templar sciences operating around the Nazi Party—for instance, the adepts of the Thule Gesellschaft founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorf—is a phenomenon that has been widely studied.^† Apparently in Nazi circles they also paid attention to another theory, which posits that the earth is empty and we live not on its outside, on its eternal, convex crust, but inside it, on the internal concave surface. This theory was articulated at the beginning of the nineteenth century by a certain Captain J. Cleves Symmes of Ohio, who wrote to various scientific societies: "To the whole world: I declare the earth is hollow, habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres; one within the other, and that it is open at the pole twelve or sixteen degrees." A wooden model of his universe is still preserved in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

The theory was taken up again in the second half of the century by Cyrus Reed Teed, who specified that what we think is the sky is a mass of gas filling the inside of the globe, with some zones of brilliant light. The sun, the moon, and the stars are not, he said, celestial globes, but rather visual effects caused by various phenomena.

After the First World War the theory was introduced into Germany by Peter Bender, and then by Karl Neupert, who founded the Hohlweltlehre (hollow-earth theory) movement. According to some sources, the theory was taken seriously in the upper echelons of the German hierarchy, and in some quarters of the German navy it was held that the hollow-earth theory would allow them to establish more accurately the positions of British ships, because if they used infrared rays, the curve of the earth would not obscure their observation.^* It is even said that some shots with the V-1s missed their targets precisely because they calculated their trajectory on the hypothesis of a concave, not a convex, earth's surface. Here—if this is true—we can see the historical, even providential usefulness of deranged astronomical theories.

But it is easy to say that the Nazis were mad and that they are all dead, apart from good old Martin Borman, who is always said to be in hiding somewhere. The fact is that if you go on the Internet and ask any search engine to find sites dealing with Hollow Earth, you will find that there are still very many followers of the theory. And it is no use saying that the sites (and the books they publicize) have been created by some cunning old foxes counting on a public of idiots and/or devotees of New Age ideas. The social and cultural problem is not the cunning foxes, but the idiots, who are clearly still legion. ^*

What unites all the stories I have mentioned, and what made them so persuasive and credible?

The Donation of Constantine was probably created not as a deliberate forgery but as a rhetorical exercise that people only began to take seriously later.

The Rosicrucian manifestos were, at least according to their presumed authors, an erudite game and, if not a joke, at least a literary exercise that could be categorized under the genre of Utopias.

Prester Johns letter was certainly a deliberate fake, but equally certainly it did not intend to produce the effects it in fact created.

Cosmas Indicopleustes was guilty of fundamentalism, a pardonable weakness considering the times in which he lived, but as we have seen, no one really took him seriously, and his text was maliciously exhumed as an "authoritative" work only more than a thousand years later.

The Protocols emerge initially on their own, through an accumulation of novelistic themes that gradually kindle the imagination of a few fanatics and become transformed en route.

And yet each one of these stories had an advantage: they appeared convincing in narrative terms, more so than day-to-day or historical reality, which is much more complex and incredible, and they seemed to provide a good explanation for something that otherwise was more difficult to understand.

Let us turn again to Ptolemy's account. We now know that Ptolemy's hypothesis was scientifically false. And yet, if our intelligence is now Copernican, our perception is still Ptolemaic: we not only see the sun rising in the East and traveling across the sky throughout the hours of daylight, but we behave as though the sun went around us and we stayed still. And we say: "the sun rises, is high in the sky, is going down, sets...." Even a professor of astronomy speaks, thinks, and perceives this way: Ptolemaically.

Why did the story of the Donation of Constantine have to be disproved? It guaranteed a continuity of power after the collapse of the empire, it perpetuated an idea of Latinity, it indicated a guide, a point of reference amid the flames and slaughters perpetrated by the many suitors who were competing for the nuptials of Europe....

Why reject Cosmas's account? In other respects he was a careful traveler, a diligent gatherer of geographical and historical curiosities, and in any case his theory of the flat earth—at least from a narrative point of view—was not entirely improbable. The earth was a huge rectangle bounded by four immense walls upholding two layers of the heavenly vault: on the first shone the stars, and on the intervening layer, or insole, lived the Blessed. Astronomical phenomena were explained by the presence of a very high mountain to the north, which by hiding the sun created night, and by coming between the sun and the light produced eclipses....

As has been observed, even Teed's hollow-earth theory was difficult to refute for nineteenth-century mathematicians, because it was possible to project the convex surface of the earth onto a concave surface without noticing too many discrepancies.

Why reject the story of the Rosicrucians if it answered the need for religious harmony? And why discount the story of the Protocols if it managed to explain so many historical events with its conspiracy myth? As Karl Popper has reminded us, "The conspiracy theory of society ... is akin to Homer's theory of society. Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened in the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies on Olympus. The conspiracy theory of society ... comes from abandoning God and then asking: 'Who is in his place?' His place is then filled by various powerful men and groups—sinister pressure groups, who are to be blamed for having planned the great depression and all the evils from which we suffer."^*

Why consider it absurd to believe in conspiracies and plots, when they are used even today to explain the failure of our actions, or the fact that events have taken a different turn from the one we wanted?

False stories are above all stories, and stories, like myths, are always persuasive. And how many other false stories could we discuss...? For instance, the myth of the Southern Land, that immense continent that was meant to run along the whole of the polar ice cap and subtropical Antarctica. The firm belief in the existence of this land (certified by countless geographical maps showing the globe wrapped, to the south, by a substantial sort of land support) encouraged navigators for three centuries and from various countries to attempt to explore the southern seas and Antarctica itself.

What can we say about El Dorado and the fountain of eternal youth, which inspired mad and courageous heroes to explore the two Americas? Of the impulse given to the new science of chemistry by the hallucinations caused by the specter of the philosophers stone? Of the story of phlogiston, the account of cosmic ether?

Let us forget for a moment that some of these false tales have produced positive effects and others have produced horror and shame. All of them have created something, for good or ill. Nothing is inexplicable about their success. What constitutes the problem is, rather, how we have managed to replace these with other stories that we consider true today. In my essay on fakes and forgeries, written some years ago, I concluded that there certainly exist tools, either empirical or conjectural, to prove that something is a fake, but that every judgment on the question presupposes the existence of an original that is authentic and true, against which the forgery is compared; however, the real cognitive problem consists not only in proving that something is a forgery but in proving that the authentic object is just that: authentic.

And yet this obvious consideration must not lead us to conclude that there is no criterion of truth, and that stories said to be false are the same as those that we consider today to be true, just because both belong to the literary genre of narrative fiction. There is a practice of verification that is based on slow, collective, public work done by what Charles Sanders Peirce called the Community. It is through our human faith in the work of this community that we can say, with a certain degree of tranquillity, that the Constitutum Constantini was a forgery, that the earth moves around the sun, and that Saint Thomas Aquinas at least knew that the earth was round.

At most, recognizing that our history has been shaped by many stories that we now regard as false must make us cautious, and always ready to call into question the very stories that we now hold as true, since the criterion of wisdom of the community is based on constant wariness about the fallibility of our knowledge.

Some years ago there appeared in France a book by Jean-François Gautier, entitled L'Univers existe-t-il?^* Does the universe exist? Good question. And what if the universe were just a concept like cosmic ether, phlogiston, or the conspiracy by the elders of Zion?

Gautier's arguments are philosophically sensible. The idea of the universe as the totality of the cosmos is an idea that comes from the most ancient cosmographies, cosmologies, and cosmogonies. But can we possibly describe, as if we could see it from above, something inside which we are contained, of which we form a part, and which we cannot leave? Can we provide a descriptive geometry of the universe when there is no space outside it onto which to project it? Can we speak of the beginning of the universe when a temporal notion like that of a beginning must refer to the parameters of a clock, whereas at most the universe is its own clock and cannot be referred to anything that is external to it? Can we say with Eddington that "hundreds of thousands of stars make up a galaxy; hundreds of thousands of galaxies make up the universe," when, as Gautier observes, although a galaxy is an object that can be observed, the universe is not, and therefore one is establishing an unwarranted analogy between two incommensurate entities? Can one postulate the universe in order to then study with empirical instruments this postulate as if it were an object? Can a singular object (certainly the most singular of all objects) exist that has as its characteristic that of being just a law? And if the story of the big bang were just a story as fantastic as the Gnostic tale that claimed that the universe was born from the mistake made by an unskillful Demiurge?

Basically this critique of the notion of the universe is like the Kantian critique of the notion of World.

Since for some people the suspicion that the sun does not go around the earth seemed at a certain moment in history just as foolish and execrable as the suspicion that the universe does not exist, it is useful to keep our mind free and fresh for the moment when the community of men of science decrees that the idea of the universe was an illusion, just like the flat earth and the Rosicrucians.

Deep down, the first duty of the Community is to be on the alert in order to be able to rewrite the encyclopedia every day.

Expanded version of the inaugural lecture for the academic year 1994–95 at the University of Bologna.