title: Foucault's Pendulum
author:  Umberto Eco 
description: If a copy (often unread) of The Name of the Rose on the coffee table was a badge of intellectual superiority in 1983, Eco's second novel--also an intellectual blockbuster--should prove more accessible. This complex psychological thriller chronicles the development of a literary joke that plunges its perpetrators into deadly peril. The narrator, Casaubon, an expert on the medieval Knights Templars, and two editors working in a branch of a vanity press publishing house in Milan, are told about a purported coded message revealing a secret plan set in motion by the Knights Templars centuries ago when the society was forced underground. As a lark, the three decide to invent a history of the occult tying a variety of phenomena to the mysterious machinations of the Order. Feeding their inspirations into a computer, they become obsessed with their story, dreaming up links between the Templars and just about every occult manifestation throughout history, and predicting that culmination of the Templars' scheme to take over the world is close at hand. The plan becomes real to them--and eventually to the mysterious They, who want the information the trio has "discovered." Dense, packed with meaning, often startlingly provocative, the novel is a mixture of metaphysical meditation, detective story, computer handbook, introduction to physics and philosophy, historical survey, mathematical puzzle, compendium of religious and cultural mythology, guide to the Torah (Hebrew, rather than Latin contributes to the puzzle here, but is restricted mainly to chapter headings), reference manual to the occult, the hermetic mysteries, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Freemasons-- ad infinitum . The narrative eventually becomes heavy with the accumulated weight of data and supposition, and overwrought with implication, and its climax may leave readers underwhelmed. Until that point, however, this is an intriguing cerebral exercise in which Eco slyly suggests that intellectual arrogance can come to no good end. <br />Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: Foucalt's Pendulum
  
  Umberto Eco
  
  Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
  
  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
  
  Superstition brings bad luck. --Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B.C., 1.3.8
  
  KETER
  
  1
  
  That was when I saw the Pendulum. The sphere, hanging from a long wire set
  into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty.
  I knew-but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing-
  that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and
  by IT, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a
  higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible
  circles. The time it took the sphe