Pancake Party

The Baconians are a faction in the invented history of the Plan, portrayed as pursuing the Templars’ hidden message through scholarship, cartography, science, and political organization. Their supposed project begins as an effort to gather initiates around a Baconian design, but its appeal and the rival groups’ competing interpretations turn it into one strand in a sprawling struggle. The faction’s history illustrates the Plan’s central danger: connections devised as a game can become convictions, and convictions can make the fiction consequential.

Origins and Aims

In the reconstruction offered by the three researchers, the English Templars advance a Masonic proposal intended to rally initiates across Europe around the Baconian plan. The effort succeeds only partly. The proposal is compelling enough that the so-called Scottish line takes the new Masonic gathering as an opportunity to restore its own succession and makes contact with German Templars. Instead of uniting the groups under one design, Masonry becomes a cover under which national factions meet and compete to seize parts of the secret.

The Baconians’ defining ambition is not simply to discover new territory but to recover the message supposedly encoded in the fragments held by different groups. The account casts John Dee as a key figure in this turn toward independent reconstruction. He studies maps, consults the cartographers Mercator and Ortelius, encourages voyages, and, in the researchers’ interpretation, treats the map as the likely form of the final message. They speculate that he may have tried to reconstruct it by magical or scientific means rather than wait for the Plan to unfold through cooperation. In this reading, impatience and individual ambition unsettle the solidarity associated with the earlier spiritual knighthood.

Science, Maps, and the Pendulum

The Baconian search is linked to the development of practical knowledge. The fragments held by the Portuguese and English are said to refer to a pendulum, although the mechanism needed to strike a sunbeam at an exact place and time could not yet be built. The six groups therefore supposedly had to calculate across centuries. The Baconian wing, however, begins work at once and makes determined efforts to draw initiates to its side.

The later history of instruments is folded into this imagined continuity. The narrative associates Salomon de Caus, described as a Rosicrucian representative, with a treatise on solar clocks, and connects subsequent research on pendulums with the effort to determine longitude. Huygens’s observation that a pendulum accurate in Paris runs slowly in Cayenne is presented as a scientific discovery about the Earth’s rotation, but within the Plan it also becomes another suggestive link. Such episodes show how actual developments in science can be recruited as evidence for a hidden design when resemblance is treated as proof.

Rival Factions and Political Uses

The Baconians’ Masonic initiative is represented as one move in a contest among national and ideological factions. The researchers imagine English, Scottish, German, French, Portuguese, and other groups maneuvering behind the public face of Masonry. In their account, Jesuit neo-Templarism responds to the rise of English Freemasonry, while later writers and political actors redirect accusations among mystics, revolutionaries, Jews, and supposed secret societies. These shifting claims do not establish the existence of the factions as described; they demonstrate how the researchers turn historical disputes into a single, self-confirming plot.

The imagined Baconian story eventually intersects with the fabrication and circulation of antisemitic conspiracy literature. The researchers attribute the Protocols to a supposed Paulician initiative and explain the text’s contradictions as part of factional strategy. They recount how material resembling the Protocols was traced to Maurice Joly’s political dialogue, and then extend that chain through increasingly speculative claims about copying, concealment, and political manipulation. In their reconstruction, the Protocols’ portrayal of a world-controlling secret group is treated as another stage in the contest between the Baconians and their rivals. The account exposes the conspiratorial method even as it demonstrates its risk: false and antisemitic accusations can be repackaged as evidence of the very plot they allege.

From Parody to Belief

The Baconians belong to a history the researchers have themselves invented by joining disparate documents and events. At first, they recognize that their associations are unwarranted and regard them as parody. But the repeated practice of connecting everything to everything else becomes habitual; the narrator reflects that pretending to believe can become indistinguishable from belief. He describes himself as becoming addicted to the game, while Diotallevi is corrupted by it and Belbo converted. The faction’s supposed history thus serves as more than a piece of the Plan: it is a pattern the researchers begin to inhabit.

The Plan’s social logic makes this transformation possible. The researchers argue that people blame hidden enemies for failures and uncertainty, while a secret plot promises an explanation and the prospect of salvation. Their invented Plan is believed by its targets, who identify fragments of their own confused traditions with the pattern and begin to act accordingly. In that sense, the Baconians’ fictional project acquires reality through the actions of those who accept it. The faction embodies the novel’s warning that a system built from analogy can become self-sealing: apparent confirmations strengthen belief, while contradictions can be absorbed as further evidence of concealment.