Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

Mysticism is a degenerate form of contact with the divine, whereas initiation is the fruit of long askesis of mind and heart.

“A typical scientific explanation, in which the cause is mistaken for the effect, or vice versa. The question is not why the water comes out in the second case, but why it refuses to come out in the first case.”

What better hiding place for the true Templar than in the crowd of his caricatures?”

“You were right. Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us of a Secret. The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect. You can read subtexts even in a traffic sign that says ‘No littering.’”

Masonry was the cover, the pretext behind which all these agents of different groups—God knows where the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites were—met and clashed, each trying to tear a piece of the secret from the others.”

“The first duty of a good spy,” I remarked, “is to denounce as spies those whom he has infiltrated.”

Believe there is a secret and you will feel like an initiate. It costs nothing.

Beware of faking: people will believe you. People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back.

But they’ve been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God.

The conspiracy theory of society . . . comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?”