8/21/2026 at 8:42:11 PM
by saulpw
8/22/2026 at 9:59:16 PM
My favorite thing about Abulafia was the description of it on the back as “an incredible computer capable of inventing connections between all of their entries”. Did the person who wrote that not read the book? Did they not understand it? Were they making a joke, where the “incredible computer” was actually the editors?by mcphage
8/22/2026 at 7:25:16 PM
i read FP before the da vinci code came out and i still can't believe it wasn't a bigger controversy. dan brown jacked the whole format.by 0gs
8/23/2026 at 7:10:41 AM
Dan Brown didn't copy Eco, he lifted most of the stuff from The Templar Revelation[0] (and he explicitly cites that).by riffraff
8/22/2026 at 9:50:53 PM
He got the meaning entirely backwards, though. Or as Eco put it, Dan Brown was a creature in one of his stories.by mcphage
8/23/2026 at 7:13:47 AM
In this story.by ibotty
8/22/2026 at 7:04:31 PM
It’s been so many years since I read Foucault’s Pendulum that I don’t recall the computer, or its program. But my memory is that the confabulation they created was real — by accident, yet it was.(The article is likely correct - it was not real but was believed to be so by people who wanted it to be. Which I in turn misremember as stumbling on something real that is confirmed bu those same conspiracy theorists.)
Perhaps I misinterpreted what I read. Yet if so that would be a surprising twist on the point of this article.
by vintagedave
8/22/2026 at 9:54:30 PM
> But my memory is that the confabulation they created was real — by accident, yet it was.The confabulation was picked up by people who, for various reasons, wanted to believe it was true. But there was no truth, there was just people looking to control others, and people willing to be controlled.
by mcphage
8/22/2026 at 8:17:58 PM
I believe the conspiracy was real, but was itself an emergent manifestation of the conspiracy hunters' paranoia.As the occultist Agliè explicitly champions, "in its loftiest sense syncretism is the acknowledgment that a single Tradition runs through and nurtures all religion, all learning, all philosophy". He asserts that "true esotericism does not fear contradiction".
None of what was published could falsify the syncretic paranoia-therefore whatever existed was the cult, since no tradition could be excluded.
by gavmor
8/22/2026 at 8:35:33 PM
my mis-intepretation is as good as yours, but IIRC their specific conspiracy wasn't real to begin with, but it _becomes_ real.That was the genius bit of the book, IMVHO.
by riffraff
8/23/2026 at 8:15:35 AM
I think I prefer that. The idea it was not real but was believed to be is not nearly as good as that it became real.by vintagedave