Foucault's Pendulum discussion

For discussion of Foucault's Pendulum, Chapter 1 through end of Chapter 6.

Please keep in mind that spoilers are allowed on these threads, so it is advised to at least read a good bit of the section as indicated before venturing into each thread if you are very sensitive to spoilers.

However, members are requested to please keep any spoilers they discuss, limited to the specific section of text under discussion in each thread. We can rather refer back to earlier parts of the book from later threads if correlation between different parts of the book are pertinent.

Our discussion is set to start November 26, keeping in mind though, that some members can only start at the end of November due to NanoWriMo and other commitments... so I suggest we go slow at the start. I'm hoping we won't get too far ahead for those members.

Since these threads will remain open indefinitely, though, please don't hesitate to share your thoughts at your own pace even when it looks as if you may have fallen behind the rest of us. We will always still come back to read your comments and share with you. :)

Thanks for giving form and organizing the discussion thread Trav. Starting to warm up for this long-distance race! :)

Looking at it as series of sprints; looking forward to digressions on the arcane and nerdy.

Heh, okay, now you're making me purchase some sports drinks and water bottles.

I see that not only should we be getting ready our running shoes and our water bottles, but also our detective equipment. I feel like I should be borrowing Sherlock Holmes's magnifying glass. And getting my puzzle-building skills out of the box.

Just as an appetizer, I'm going to quote Eco's very first quote at the start of the book. It comes before chapter one starts:

Only for you, children of doctrine and learning, have we written this work. Examine this book, ponder the meaning we have dispersed in various places and gathered again; what we have concealed in one place we have disclosed in another, that it may be understood by your wisdom

--Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, 3, 65

Does that sound like a warning or a clue? :D

Damn! Apparently I'm going to need some wisdom.…

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Damn! Apparently I'm going to need some wisdom.…"

Well, if you'll at least supply the doctrine and learning... ;D

..but hoo, boy, the quote is a forewarning indeed. Per Wikipedia,

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (15 September 1486 – 18 February 1535) was a German magician, occult writer, theologian, astrologer, and alchemist.
[...]
Sidebar:(view spoiler)[
During his wandering life in Germany, France and Italy he worked as a theologian, physician, legal expert and soldier.

He was for some time in the service of Maximilian I, probably as a soldier in Italy, but devoted his time mainly to the study of the occult sciences and to problematic theological legal questions, which exposed him to various persecutions through life, usually in the mode described above: He would be privately denounced for one sort of heresy or another. [...] (hide spoiler)]

There is no evidence that Agrippa was seriously accused, much less persecuted, for his interest in or practice of magical or occult arts during his lifetime, apart from losing several positions.

I wonder why Eco is so apparently obsessed with heresies through the Middle Ages; he is a semiotician, for Pete's sake. Perhaps heresies were what he actually wanted to spec in, and maybe there were too many people in that field already? *shrug* ...or perhaps studying symbolism and codes inherent in culture somehow led him to focus on how these operated in the Middle Ages?

Ah, no, his interest in Medieval studies came first, and semiotics only came later.

Wait, let me post the relevant bit I found on Wikipedia in the background thread, shall I?

This is interesting http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agr...

This frames nicely with our discussion of semiotics and reformers.

Thanks, Jonfaith!

The bits I quoted came from Wikipedia, which obviously stole some from the Stanford article, which is of course the more reputable source. :) I must remember to use it rather.

Heresies are great fun; I wonder if Nroman Cohn's book would be of any use here;
Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages
It's over 30 years since i read it, so it's a bit hazy

Good citation, Paul. John Gray'sBlack Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia is a more contemporary examination along the same lines, though more theoretical and less researched than Cohn.

Cool, guys, I hope you still remember a bit of that when we get to the heretical stuff, since I for one, probably won't have time to read those books in time to inform this book... :)

Anyway, since the main discussion hasn't started yet, quickly want to post some links in regard to some background material. We have a separate thread for that, but it seems as if people aren't going to be too bothered with the separate thread, so I may as well post it in this thread?

It's about the Laboratory of Lavoisier and his mirrors.

Here is a link for more about Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry, with some images of his equipment that the narrator of this first part sees in the museum: http://www.artsense.eu/use-cases/labo...

And here is a close-up of the mirrors he mentions:

I think for my own sake even if for nobody else's , I'm going to want to tease out the main narrative from amongst all Eco's meanderings:

The first four chapters:

The novel begins with the main character and narrator, Casaubon, looking for a hiding place in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris. We have no idea what is really going on: the narrator (whose name we later find out is Causabon) seems to be wanting to hide in the museum until closing time so that he can be alone in the museum in order to witness some sort of event the nature of which is not initially revealed to us.

The narrator embarks on a flashback and we notice that we have four characters who seem to be working in an office in Milan together with the narrator: Gudrun, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo, [both from Piedmont ;)] and the narrator Casaubon.

Something bad happens to Belbo while on the phone with Casaubon - who had captured Belbo? The Rosicrucians? The Comte de Saint-Germain? The Okhrana? The Knights of the Temple? The Assassins? (Who the heck are The Assassins even?)

And who is Lorenza Pelligrini? Sounds like Belpo's love interest.
Also, why is Diotavelli in hospital?

Basically all that happens in the main plot up to chapter 5, is that Casaubon goes to Belpo's apartment where their office PC resides, where he tries to crack Belpo's password to get access to his files.

However, Eco cracks quite a few jokes on his way through the narrative. He embroiders quite a bit on the forgiving nature of digital memory.

I enjoyed his splat joke, but I do have a taste for black humor.

Of course we do have to remember that the novel was published in 1988 when personal computers were still in their infancy. Note that Eco often calls it a "word processor" but it's clearly a PC since it can accommodate BASIC programs separate from the word-processing software.
Eco also makes a nod to Proust and "In search of lost memory[/time]" plays on Proust's novel "Remembrance of Things Past" or À la recherche du temps perdu, Tome I

Eco also keeps making nods to Noir detective fiction with his references to Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade.

In chapter 5 and 6 Eco shows off his knowledge of Temurah, gematria, factor analysis and so forth. As far as it concerns the plot, we find out that Casaubon has learned something quite astounding and/or disturbing after finally cracking Belbo's password in a quite humoristic way.

Btw, I couldn't help thinking of those anagram and crossword apps one gets for free on the internet these days.
Phew, but computers were slow back in 1988! :)

..and that's about it as far as the plot goes up to this point, I'd say.

The rest is all Geeky stuff for us to ruminate over. :D

A bit on Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia, the founder of the school of "Prophetic Kabbalah", who was born in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1240.

Of special importance for understanding his messianology are his “prophetic books” written between 1279 (in Patras) and 1288 (in Messina), in which revelations including apocalyptic imagery and scenes are interpreted as pointing to spiritual processes of inner redemption. The spiritualized understanding of the concepts of messianism and redemption as an intellectual development represents a major contribution of the messianic ideas in Judaism. As part of his messianic propensity, Abulafia become an intense disseminator of his Kabbalah, orally and in written form, trying to convince both Jews and Christians.

Abulafia developed a sophisticated theory of language, which assumes that Hebrew represents not so much the language as written or spoken as the principles of all languages, namely the ideal sounds and the combinations between them. Thus, Hebrew as an ideal language encompasses all the other languages. This theory of language might have influenced Dante Alighieri (who wrote The Divine Comedy ).

I'm afraid my sources are not very academic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_...

I'm hoping some of you can point to more academic sources for this interesting trend in Medieval scholarship.
I'm guessing Eco would have made his acquaintance with Abulafia during his Medieval studies.

I found a bit on Abulafia in this piece on Gershom Scholem at the Stanford site: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sch...

Eco quotes from the Jorge Luis Borges poem
El golem:

Judá León se dio a permutaciones
de letras y a complejas variaciones
y al fin pronunció el Nombre que es la Clave,

la Puerta, el Eco, el Huésped y el Palacio,

(The entire poem can be read at:
http://www.poemas-del-alma.com/jorge-... )


Friend Kalliope helped me out with a translation of the quoted passages:

Judá León se dio a permutaciones
Juda León worked out (various) permutations

De letras y a complejas variaciones
of letters and complex variations

Y al fin pronunció el Nombre que es la Clave,
And finally pronounced the Name which is the Key,

La Puerta, el Eco, el Huésped y el Palacio...
The Door, the Echo, the Guest and the Palace...

Many thanks to Kalliope!
***


Lee todo en: El golem - Poemas de Jorge Luis Borges http://www.poemas-del-alma.com/jorge-...

Of course, for Magdalanye, the translations are in Spanish too :(

I'm sorely lacking a reference book at hand whilst reading, as (for example) it was obvious that Abulafia was some sort of reference, but to what I was unable to discern as I was reading, and since I read while commuting I'm generally too distracted once I get in to work or get home to remember to look these things up.

In particular the Kabbalah is clearly central to the whole work, but I know nothing about it. Obviously I will need to do some research when I'm supposed to be working tomorrow. ;)

I find it interesting, Traveller, that you noticed Casaubon referring to the computer itself as a word processor. That had escaped me, but it's actually sincething I'd seen before in contemporaneous works both fictional and factual where computers are involved. In those days, computers would frequently be purchased by businesses to fulfill a single purpose, but far better than technology otherwise allowed. Often this purpose would be a word processor, so the machine became the embodiment of the function. In this day and age we similarly have game consoles, televisions, Blu-ray players, network routers, book readers, cellular phones and others which are (or can be made to be) general-purpose computers, but we tend to think of them solely in relation to their intended purpose.

Today general-pupose computers are a rather mundane commodity, and their users are pretty far removed from the nitty-gritty. In those days you held the nitty-gritty in your hands: enormous disks with paltry storage, windows cut in their sleeves through which dust and contaminants could corrupt data---and mechanical motors moving magnets with agonizing slowness to read bits off!

Sometimes I do feel a bit of nostalgia...

I remember that there were two kinds of disks "floppies" (which were the very oldest kind that came just after people were using magnetic tape (or still contemporaneous with those?)) that consisted of (and please correct me here if I'm wrong) magnetic tape inside a sort of plastic cover. This disc was soft and could be bent. I presume this is what Casaubon was working with? Later on you got stiffies (and/or still contemporaneous with floppies) which consisted of a smaller harder disc which could not be bent.

Only after that did we get CD's then DVD's and then sticks and external drives and the likes.

Talking of the nitty gritty: yip, before the days of Windows, one had to navigate through your PC manually! (And it was not amiss at all for PC users to know at least a little bit of BASIC. I still remember doing my first Hello World! :D)

Traveller wrote: "I remember that there were two kinds of disks "floppies" (which were the very oldest kind that came just after people were using magnetic tape (or still contemporaneous with those?)) that consisted..."

And not to time travel too far, but one of the greatest innovations was when PC's had a hard drive added. Before that, just two floppy drives - one for your app, one for your data.

I wonder if a century from now, these books will need additional notes added to explain "word processor", "cell phone", etc. Interesting that Eco placed the opening scene in the 'old technology' museum in Paris. There's a similar tech museum in San Jose.

http://www.thetech.org/

Jim wrote: "I wonder if a century from now, these books will need additional notes added to explain "word processor", "cell phone"..."

I feel pretty sure they'd scratch their heads at the idea of a word processor, at the very least.
Which reminds me I still wanted to comment on something; let me quote:

"I knew why Diotallevi distrusted Abulafia. He had heard that word processors could change the order of letters. A text, thus, might generate its opposite and result in obscure prophecies. "It's a game of permutation," Belbo said, trying to explain. "Temurah? Isn't that the name for it? Isn't that what the devout rabbi does to ascend to the Gates of Splendor?"

Firstly, I'm not sure what he is referring to in mentioning that 'word processors' could 'change the order of letters'? Was this some kind of urban myth at the time, or is he referring to the fact that one could program software to do permutations?

Also, I wanted to look up 'Temurah'. :P

Jim wrote: " one of the greatest innovations was when PC's had a hard drive added. Before that, just two floppy drives - one for your app, one for your data."

I hadn't realized that. No wonder they were so slow! I did know that they had tiny teeny small amounts of memory, both regarding RAM and storage. I remember a time when 400MB was an amazingly large amount of storage space and quite sufficient for all one's needs. Of course, people back then didn't keep videos and films on their hard drives, and PC's could hardly reproduce anything close to realistic sounds.

I rather enjoyed Eco's musings on the wonders of digital storage, and no doubt at the time that the book was published, what he wrote was probably regarded as a lot of geeky showing off regarding this new technology. But how Eco must smile if he were to read through those passages again today.

Traveller wrote: "I rather enjoyed Eco's musings on the wonders of digital storage, and no doubt at the time that the book was published, what he wrote was probably regarded as a lot of geeky showing off regarding this new technology. But how Eco must smile if he were to read through those passages again today...."

And a good analogy of the book's overall musing on philosophy, science, secret societies, etc., and how these things change over time - a long strange trip from "We have angered Poseidon" to "Tectonic plates" as explanations for earthquakes. Looking forward to wherever else he goes in these musings.

Sidebar:(view spoiler)[An interesting look at some major discoveries in human history and a good read. The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself (hide spoiler)]

Per Wikipedia, Temurah is one of the three ancient methods used by Kabbalists to rearrange words and sentences in the Bible, in the belief that by this method they can derive the esoteric substratum and deeper spiritual meaning of the words.

Sidebar:(view spoiler)[(The others are Gematria and Notarikon.) Temurah may be used to change letters in certain words to create a new meaning for a Biblical statement. The Hebrew alphabet is an Abjad or consonantary alphabet. Techniques that applied to English will mostly transform sense into a nonsensical series of letters are more feasible in Hebrew.

There are three simple forms of Temurah:

Atbash: Replacing the first letter with the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the second with the next-to-last, and so on.

a=z, b=y, c=x, etc.

Avgad: Replacing each letter with the preceding letter.

a=b, b=c, c=d

Albam: Replacing the first letter of the alphabet with the twelfth, the second with the thirteenth, and so on.

a=l, b=m, c=n, etc. (hide spoiler)]

Gematria is a traditional Jewish system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase, in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other, or bear some relation to the number itself as it may apply to a person's age, the calendar year, or the like.
Sidebar:(view spoiler)[
Although the term is Hebrew, it most likely derives from Greek geōmetriā, "geometry", which was used as a translation of gēmaṭriyā, though some scholars believe it to derive from Greek grammateia, rather; it's possible that both words had an influence on the formation of the Hebrew word.
(Some also hold it to derive from the order of the Greek alphabet, gamma being the third letter of the Greek alphabet (gamma + tria).) The word has been extant in English since the 17th century from translations of works by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Although ostensibly derived from Greek, it is largely used in Jewish texts, notably in those associated with the Kabbalah.

Some identify two forms of gematria: the "revealed" form, which is prevalent in many hermeneutic methods found throughout Rabbinic literature, and the "mystical" form, a largely Kabbalistic practice. (hide spoiler)]

The best-known example of Gematria is the Hebrew word Chai ("life"), which is composed of two letters which add up to 18. This has made 18 a "lucky number" among Jews, and gifts in multiples of 18 are very common.
There's more about gematria here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria

This is starting to sound a lot like the Da Vinci code, huh?

I knew the Greeks were obsessed with numbers, but I hadn't realized the extent of Jewish obsession with numbers.

I had known a tiny bit about the Kabbalah, knowing it was a mystical Jewish school of thought rather reminiscent (to me) of hinduism in the sense of that I knew that some Western schools of "magical" thought superimposed the Hindu chakras over the tree of life of the mystical Kabbalah.

So, the Hindu version:



transposed upon the tree of life gives the Kabbalistic version:



What seems to be emerging to me from what Eco is writing and our research on that, though, is the idea that words and numbers have 'magic' connotations to them.

One is also reminded of the Biblical pronunciation of that : "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1.1)

I really enjoyed the technological nostalga discussion this a.m. I had hoped to wait until Turkey Day to begin FP but the pull from the excelelnt comments has rendered that impossible.

Jonfaith wrote: "I really enjoyed the technological nostalga discussion this a.m. I had hoped to wait until Turkey Day to begin FP but the pull from the excelelnt comments has rendered that impossible."

(view spoiler)[

Yooou shallll read Foucault's Pendulum NOOOOOWWWW!!!! (hide spoiler)]

I read the first chapter yesterday night and I am already drowned with uncountable scientific references and sophisticated descriptions of foreign mechanisms.
Thanks for the summary of the first 5 chapters Trav, that was handy indeed.
I have noticed the quotations at the beginning of each chapter might be more than simple preludes of what is coming. Couldn't help noticing Casaubon (I still didn't know his name) mentioning Francis Bacon at the end of the first chapter and the second one starts precisely with one of his quotes from New Atlantis.
Going to study the Tree of Life of the Kabbala now, thanks for the info again Trav.
This is going to be fun.

Oh, I also found this passage in chapter one really intuitive of what we can expect of this journey:

"You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple"

I find your post about Lavoisier's equipment and his mirrors fits perfectly well the idea of "the illusion of the multiple". Will Eco be playing a game of mirrors to the reader? Starting at "Keter" the beginning of the universe, which might turn out to be the end?

Must read book... Must read book....

Wait, what was I saying? ;)

I think Casaubon may have using "word processor" to mean computer when referring to the rearranging of letters. I'm not sufficiently versed in the capabilities of 1980s word processing software to say whether they could generate anagrams, though.

As for floppies and tape and diskettes and so on, it may interest you to know that magnetic tape is still used today, though usually only for archival storage, since one can only do sequential reading and writing easily, whereas more common storage is random-access as a matter of course.

I remember the first time I filled up my 400MB hard drive. I had tried to install Mortal Kombat. So I removed Microsoft Office. Who needs that? :P

Traveller wrote: "Later on you got stiffies (and/or still contemporaneous with floppies) which consisted of a smaller harder disc which could not be bent."

Brits talk dirty. You really don't want to know when I get stiffies. We always called those floppies, too (floppies came in 8", 5½" and 3¼" sizes, all were, internally, a thin plastic disc covered in magnetic recording medium).

Dolors wrote: "Will Eco be playing a game of mirrors to the reader? Starting at "Keter" the beginning of the universe, which might turn out to be the end? "

Eco makes numerous literary and cultural jokes. I vote we all make mention of them in the relevant threads as we go along. I found lots of them in the next section. I feel like posting them now already before I forget them. I'll just cover them (in the next thread) with spoiler tags in case people feel tempted to peep early.

One of the jokes is pretty obvious. As the joke dawns on you, you realize that Eco is playing with the reader with a straight face for most of the time. :)

Talking of jokes I like that the hero is called Causabon - who is the Anglican Priest from Middlemarch who wastes his life on Biblical studies not realising that that German scholarship has moved the debate on past his speculations about Dagon the Fish God and co.

Coming back to the first few pages I'm struck by how deeply the narrator's thought is coloured by the inventions, and equal to the original Causabon, silly speculations of the trinity of 'heroes'.

Jan-Maat wrote: "Talking of jokes I like that the hero is called Causabon - who is the Anglican Priest from Middlemarch who wastes his life on Biblical studies not realising that that German scholarshi..."

Yes! I was going to mention his name in the second thread, but you've put it very nicely in context there, Jan-maat.
(" about Dagon the Fish God and co." <<< that was your own little joke, wasn't it? ;P )

But anyway, yes, in the case of Middlemarch's Casaubon, the stodgy old guy never got around to publishing his work before he died, so I was wondering if that somehow characterized the Casaubon in FP.

Traveller wrote: "But anyway, yes, in the case of Middlemarch's Casaubon, the stodgy old guy never got around to publishing his work before he died, so I was wondering if that somehow characterized the Casaubon in FP"

I think there is a similarity there too iirc.

For your convenience, the qualities represented by the 10 sephira, are:

1. Keter-"Crown" (Chapters 1 & 2)
2. Chokhmah/Hohkmah-"Wisdom" (Chapters 3 - 6)
3. Binah-"Understanding" (Chapters 7 - 22)
4. Chesed/Hesed-"Kindness"
5. Gevurah-"Severity"
6. Tiferet-"Beauty"
7. Netzach-"Eternity"
8. Hod-"Splendour"
9. Yesod-"Foundation"
10. Malkuth-"Kingship"

Oh! I still wanted to ask if anyone knows what "Metacyclosynchrotron " means, and while trying to find an answer on the internet, lookee what I found!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sha...

Hmm, I wonder how important those quotes at the beginning of each chapter are? (To the plot and to unravel Eco's puzzles, I mean)

Oh, and I've been wanting to say that I quite enjoy Eco's sense of humor... :P

Traveller wrote: "Oh! I still wanted to ask if anyone knows what "Metacyclosynchrotron " means, and while trying to find an answer on the internet, lookee what I found!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sha......"

And wp asks the question: "could it mean cyclotron?"

Of course not! I haven't got there, yet, but surely a Metacyclosynchrotron is to a cyclotron as a Ferrari is to a bicycle.

ROFL

RE: Msg 23
Well, now, that was definitive Holy Shit Moment, had to refer to the terms of service for the proper classification.

Jonfaith wrote: "RE: Msg 23
Well, now, that was definitive Holy Shit Moment, had to refer to the terms of service for the proper classification."

Sorry, did Kitty give you a fright? But did it work at at least? :D

Am on first page of HOKHMAH, p. 19 in my HB paperback.

So you are soon to attain some wisdom, apparently. :)

Here's the translation of the quote that was in Hebrew:

"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 draw and shaped into a wheel, perfectly circular all around."

My note on the chapters. I counted the grouping just in case there's a clue to that.

The chapters are in groupings of the ten Sephirot. Keter (will), 2 chapters. Hokhmah (wisdom), 4 ch. Binah (understanding), 16 ch. Hesed (kindness), 11 ch. Gevurah (severity), 30 ch. Tiferet (beauty), 43 ch. Nezah (eternity), 5 ch. Hod (splendor), 6 ch. Yesod (foundation), 2 ch. Malkhut (kingship) 1 ch.

The inscription behind Lorenza's photograph Casaubon finds in Belbo's apartment makes me wonder about the portrait of the feminine archetype Eco might be trying to paint:

"For I am the first and the last, the honored and the hated, the saint and the prostitute. Sophia."

Sophia?
Six letters?
I searched the web to find the source of these lines and gnostic Nag Hammadi's gospels came up:

http://gnosis.org/naghamm/Pagels-Gnos...

A taste on the gnostic gospels:

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnostic_...

In these gospels Sophia represents the exiled bride and mother of Demiurge and Nag Hammadi describes her with the lines above.
Could this be a prelude of a volcanic and passionate woman?

Aloha wrote: "My note on the chapters. I counted the grouping just in case there's a clue to that.

The chapters are in groupings of the ten Sephirot. Keter (will), 2 chapters. Hokhmah (wisdom), 4 ch. Binah (un..."

Ah, okay, good idea to count the groupings. I get a sort of pattern with 2, 4, 16, but after that doesn't seem an obvious pattern, unless we drew a graph of it? I'm curious now of what shape it will make in graph form. I used to have software that does it for you, but I think one can do it with Powerpoint and possibly Excel as well.

(Btw, have you seen my message 21 above, and also https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... ? ) for physical interpretations and representations of the "tree of life?". Also for how the Hebrew letters look for each Sepiroth.

Dolors wrote: "The inscription behind Lorenza's photograph Casaubon finds in Belbo's apartment makes me wonder about the portrait of the feminine archetype Eco might be trying to paint:

"For I am the first and t..."

Oh yes, I remember reading about the Nag Hammadi scrolls long ago, and also about the Gnostic gospels. Have you read Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels ? I actually did read it long ago, but can't remember much of it.

Interesting connotations, Dolors! I love how you're picking up on Eco's clues.

I had always thought 'Sofia' stood for 'wisdom', but now that you mention the Demiurge, that is mentioned in Belbo's notes a bit further on in the book.

Btw, you guys can move on to thread no. 2 whenever you feel ready: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I found the Sophia reference immensely interesting.

The Abu interlude is where the novel finds its feet. Eco's initial stride in the novel is one of noir and then the "found" file allows the maestro to waltz on about taxonomy and permutation. If only existence was subject to such organizing principles.

I have to keep in mind my present thoughts on FP; too often I am distracted by ideas i managed before in my earlier readings. Do these recollections obstruct? Are they wedging the doors to dialogue closed?

I finished the section. Today is a brilliant frozen holiday in Indiana. My reading is constantly reminded its own history. My reactions are being reworked not replaced but perhaps covered by stacked sensations and conclusions.

Our house is rich today with smells of cooking. I am perched as an exact opposite of Casaubon. While blessed with being incredulous, I usually lack agency. That said, I savor this novel, not for its clunky mechanics, not for being a barrage of info dumps, but because it allows us to dance madly in the perverse complexity of it all.

Traveller wrote: "Dolors wrote: "The inscription behind Lorenza's photograph Casaubon finds in Belbo's apartment makes me wonder about the portrait of the feminine archetype Eco might be trying to paint:

"For I am ..."

No, I haven't Trav, but it seems like a must-read to better understand the origins of Christianity.
"Sophia" as wisdom, of course.
I wonder whether Eco is putting the female figure to the test as he seems to be doing with traditionally arcane wisdom and his particular jocose tone.

@ Jonfaith: I'm enjoying your commentary delivered in an almost stream of consciousness form, Jonfaith, making us a party to your thoughts and impressions as you re-embark on this journey from a different port as previously. :)

@ Dolors: I'm not sure exactly to where you have read by now, Dolors, but penis envy is mentioned a bit further on in the text (which made me wonder what Lit Bug is currently doing. We had a little chat re the subject not too long ago.)

But back to the Gnostic Gospels: I would have given Pagels' book a quick skim through again now if I wasn't also still struggling with getting two other books from the 'currently reading ' pile into the 'read' pile.

But this review of Chris' cropped up which I found strangely relevant to our reading here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Aloha wrote: "Here's the translation of the quote that was in Hebrew:

"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, i..."

Thanks, Aloha! That sounds biblical, but more mathematical than the Bible; which seems to point to its more kabbalistic origin? Who would have thought that mystical sects would be so very pre-occupied with mathematics. But I suppose it does make a kind of sense once you think about about--the 'magic in numbers' train of thinking that seems to dovetail with the 'magic in language' train of thinking.

Mathematics as an extension of religion makes a lot of sense to me, actually. Numbers are infinite, for one, and therefore beyond absolute human knowing, and the more one investigates the seeming chaos of equations and formulae the more one finds order and elegance. If one subscribes to the notion of an all-knowing deity, mathematics could very easily seem to be the language of god. I believe Galileo voiced something to that effect, didn't he?