Angels

Angels in Foucault’s Pendulum occupy the uncertain boundary between religious cosmology and human invention. They are invoked as powers that might illuminate creation, disclose a concealed Plan, or authenticate ritual; yet the episodes associated with them repeatedly show interpreters trying to make them serve purposes the evidence cannot confirm. Their importance lies as much in this gap between invocation and knowledge as in the supernatural claims themselves.

Creation and Cosmic Order

In a remembered account attributed to Diotallevi, Angels belong to a cosmology that begins before the world has taken settled form. The first Sefirah, Keter, is described as the Crown and primal void; a point becomes Thought, and a dark, formless light gives rise to flames that illuminate the lower Sefirot down to the Kingdom. This account does not present Angels as independent characters in a scene. Instead, it places the sacred order in a chain of emanation and gives the creation of the world a language of points, signs, light, and descent. Diotallevi’s further suggestion that diminishment and separation may already contain the promise of return makes cosmic division part of a possible movement back toward unity.

The account is filtered through Casaubon’s act of recollection while he waits in hiding. He retreats into a remote corner of his mind and draws on what Diotallevi had told him, setting the creation narrative beside the present crisis. The resulting frame matters: this is not an authoritative revelation from Angels but a remembered explanation, summoned by a narrator trying to impose intelligibility on chaos.

Theories of Angelic Power

The novel also connects Angels to a more unsettling argument about liberation from cosmic authority. Casaubon recalls encountering the claim attributed to Carpocrates that the rulers of the cosmos are Angels, and that a person might seek escape from their dominion by exhausting worldly and bodily passions. He later observes that some occult enthusiasts pursue this path in search of enlightenment. The idea gives Angels a double position: they can be part of an ordered sacred hierarchy, but they can also be imagined as powers from whose rule a seeker hopes to break free.

That opposition belongs to the novel’s wider inquiry into belief and interpretation, not to a demonstrated account of what Angels do. The claim is encountered through reading and recollection, then incorporated into the material the characters use to construct their Plan. The more comprehensive the Plan becomes, the easier it is for any cosmology—including one that casts Angels as cosmic rulers—to be absorbed into it.

Dee’s Search for Messages

In the historical strand imagined by the Plan, John Dee’s work joins angelic communication to cartography and exploration. Dee studies maps and promotes voyages, working with Pedro Nunes, the Portuguese royal cosmographer. He encourages expeditions toward the Northwest Passage and the East, invests in Martin Frobisher’s voyage toward the Pole, and supports Francis Drake’s circumnavigation. At the departure of one expedition, he summons Angels. Yet the account emphasizes that Dee may care less about discovering places than about representing them: maps could be fragments of a message whose completed form would disclose a larger whole.

Dee’s angelic practice is therefore entangled with a theory of knowledge. He is imagined as attempting to reconstruct a hidden message by cartographic, magical, or scientific means rather than waiting for the Plan to unfold through collective action. The explanation remains a character’s interpretation of Dee’s motives, not a verified conclusion. Within the Plan’s logic, however, the possibility that Dee might pursue the message independently turns the study of Angels into another sign of impatience, ambition, and the erosion of spiritual solidarity.

Summoning, Limits, and Secrecy

The imagined Dee episode makes the difference between summoning and understanding especially clear. Edward Kelley secretly searches Dee’s private strongbox, finds formulas, and attempts to summon Angels on a full-moon night. Dee finds him inside the Macrocosm’s circle, with the Pentacle of Solomon on his brow. Kelley’s experiment does not establish that an Angel has answered; instead, Dee rebukes him and warns him to be careful. The episode presents access to occult formulas as a threshold that can be crossed without possessing the knowledge needed to use them.

When Kelley asks why Dee cannot communicate with the French through his Angels, Dee rejects the idea that they function as messengers on demand. Drawing on Trithemius, he says that the addressee’s Angels intervene only to clarify a message if one has already been received. The distinction sets a limit on what angelic communication can accomplish: it may aid interpretation, but it cannot simply carry a desired message to an absent party. Dee’s response redirects the search toward Prague and the German line, while leaving the presumed power of the Angels untested.

A later note attributed to Casaubon recasts the same problem as a personal test. Lorenza challenges him to approach the Angels with humility, draw the right circle, and appeal even without believing; perhaps, he thinks, this could bring peace. The uncertainty is essential. The passage neither confirms that he performs the rite nor claims that Angels grant him peace. Instead, it shows how the possibility of a secret can itself make someone feel initiated, even where belief is provisional and the promised assurance remains inaccessible.

Ritual Language and Ambiguous Presence

At the modern ceremony, angelic names form part of a collective ritual performance. Bramanti chants a sequence of letters, and the crowd answers with a litany of names, including Pamersiel, Padiel, and Camuel. A kneeling participant then recites ritual formulas from memory. The scene presents the invocation as organized and communal, but it does not establish that the names summon or reveal actual Angels. Their immediate narrative function is to give the ceremony an authoritative language and to bind the participants into a shared act.

The ceremony’s violence exposes the distance between sacred vocabulary and the conduct performed in its name. Bramanti continues with an exorcistic formula as the group prepares to use the Pendulum in a human sacrifice. The account connects Angels to a crowded mixture of names and traditions, not to a clear divine intervention that halts events or settles the truth of the conspirators’ beliefs. The ceremonial words intensify the scene’s claim to supernatural authority while leaving that authority unverified.

Elsewhere, the Baphomet appears on the facade of Saint-Merri beside the image of a dove of the Holy Spirit. Casaubon notices the two figures in the same architectural setting, with the Baphomet opposed to praying Angels. The juxtaposition does not prove a hidden relation between them; its force comes from the way Casaubon reads sacred and demonic images as signs within the Plan. Across these episodes, Angels remain both objects of invocation and elements in a human system of interpretation: repeatedly named, sought, and arranged, but never made into an uncontested source of knowledge.