Foucault's pendulum is a device that clearly proves the fact of the Earth's rotation around its axis. It is named after its inventor, the French scientist Jean-Léon Foucault, who first demonstrated its action at the Paris Panthéon in 1851. At first glance, there is nothing complicated in the device of the pendulum. This is a simple ball suspended from the dome of a tall building on a long rope (67 meters during the first experiment). If you push the pendulum, then after a few minutes the ball will not move in a straight line of oscillation amplitude, but “write out eights”. This movement gives the ball the rotation of our planet.
Now the original device is stored in the Paris Museum of Crafts in the Church of St. Martin in the Fields, and its copies are widely distributed and used in numerous natural history museums. For some reason, Foucault's pendulum was used as an argument in favor of the non-existence of God in the native expanses. However, the innocent visual aid was destined for a wider glory - literary. For itserved as the title for a famous novel.
The work of Umberto Eco "Foucault's Pendulum" is rightfully considered a model of postmodernism. The author - a very well-read and erudite person - literally bombards the reader with quotations, allusions and references to other literary works, historical facts and sources. Admirers of the work of this writer are advised to read his books, having a large encyclopedic dictionary at hand. But Eco wants not to shock with his knowledge and enlighten people - his plan is more grandiose.
The plot of the book seems quite realistic: student Casaubon writes a scientific work about the monastic order of the Knights Templar. He becomes friends with Belbo and Dtotallevi, employees of the Garamon publishing house. Further, the narrative slips slightly from the solid ground of reality into a foggy area of untested hypotheses, assumptions, esoteric fantasies and myths. Both historical facts about the knights of the templars, and lengthy quotes from the Kabbalah, the "Chemical Wedding" of the Rosicrucians, as well as Gnostic formulas and information about the magical meaning of numbers among the Pythagoreans, pour on the readers' heads. The protagonist of the novel "Foucault's Pendulum" thinks about the posthumous fate of the Templar organization, especially after a certain colonel, having appeared at the publishing house, leaves them the "Plan of the Knights of the Order of the Temple", which is inscribed for centuries. The fact that the next day the soldier disappears without a trace only strengthens Casaubon's confidence that the document is not a fake.
Gradually, the main character completely lost the solid ground of truth under his feet. Paulicians and Rosicrucians, Assassins, Jesuits, and Nestorians replace real people for him. Casabon himself becomes "obsessed", fully believing in the Plan, although his girlfriend Leah assures that the document is just the calculations of the seller from the flower shop. But it's too late: a heated imagination tells the hero that they should look for the tellurgic axis of the world in the Parisian church of St. Martin, which now houses the Museum of Crafts and where Foucault's pendulum swings under the dome. There they are attacked by a crowd of other "obsessed" who want to take over the plan and open the key to absolute power - Hermetists, Gnostics, Pythagoreans and alchemists. They kill Belbo and Leah.
What did Umberto Eco want to say in the novel Foucault's Pendulum? That esotericism is an opium for intellectuals, as religion is for the people? Or is it that nav, one has only to touch it, crawls out into the real world, as if from Pandora's box? Or that the search for the golden key, with which you can control the whole world, turns into the fact that the seeker becomes a pawn in the game of unknown forces? The author leaves the reader to answer this question.
