Picatrix séance and the medium's disappearance

The Picatrix séance and the medium’s disappearance form a compact episode in which an occult performance seems to revive a secret connected to Colonel Ardenti, then dissolves into competing explanations. At the séance, the medium speaks of a temple, six seals, a wait of one hundred and twenty years, and the thirty-six invisibles; after she vanishes, Inspector De Angelis closes the case as a drug-related flight. Casaubon later imagines that someone silenced her because she knew too much. The gap between those accounts makes the episode a miniature of the novel’s larger danger: once resemblance becomes a method of explanation, even a plausible ending can be recast as evidence of a hidden plan.

Background and Setting

Two years after Colonel Ardenti disappeared, Jacopo Belbo writes to Casaubon from Italy with an update on the old investigation. Belbo’s account begins at the Fortress of San Leo, where he had been visiting the cell in which Cagliostro was imprisoned and died. The confined room—with its ceiling trapdoor and small window looking only onto the village’s two churches—had become a pilgrimage site for devotees. Among the regular visitors were members of Picatrix, a Milanese group of occult students that published a magazine of the same name.

Belbo follows his curiosity back to Milan. He obtains an issue of Picatrix, learns that a spirit evocation for Cagliostro is scheduled, and attends. The event’s setting makes theatrical display part of its claim to mystery: banners covered in cabalistic signs, owls, scarabs, ibises, uncertainly identified Oriental divinities, and a stage furnished with torches, an altar, statuettes of Isis and Osiris, a gilded mummy, a gong, tripods, crowns, and a portable sarcophagus. The cluttered ritual apparatus supplies the séance with an air of antiquity before the medium has spoken a word.

The Séance

Seven altar boys carrying torches enter in red cassocks, followed by Brambilla, apparently Picatrix’s leader, dressed in pink-and-olive vestments. The medium and six acolytes follow. Brambilla dons a triple crown, takes up a ritual sword, draws symbols, and summons spirits. Yet the ceremony’s attempt to command unseen forces is repeatedly interrupted by the modern world: the microphones pick up disco music and then Radio Moscow. Brambilla silences the broadcast with an invocation, only for a drunken Cossack song to break in again at the ceremony’s most solemn moment.

The interference does not prevent the performance from escalating. Brambilla opens the sarcophagus, handles a book of spells, swings a thurible, invokes divinities, and calls insistently for “Familiar 39.” A woman in the audience falls into a trance, her eyes rolling back; as people call for a doctor, Brambilla continues the rite. The medium, who has sat down in a fake fauteuil, begins to writhe and groan. Belbo becomes uncertain whether he is watching a performance: she trembles, sweats, and cries out in apparent pain.

Speaking in broken phrases, she describes a temple and a door that must be opened, a vortex of power, and an ascent to the Great Pyramid. Then she mentions six seals, a one-hundred-and-twenty-year wait, and the thirty-six invisibles. Those details strike Belbo as unmistakably connected to the Provins message. The medium slumps back exhausted before he can hear more. Brambella strokes her brow, blesses the audience with the thurible, and declares the rite over. The episode leaves the crucial question suspended: her words might be the residue of material she has encountered, but their apparent correspondence to the message makes them sound like knowledge that should not be available to her.

Belbo’s Encounter with De Angelis

The medium recovers, puts on a shabby overcoat, and heads for a rear exit. Belbo tries to approach her, but Inspector De Angelis catches his arm and tells him to let her go, saying that he knows where to find her. At a café, De Angelis asks why Belbo attended and why he tried to speak to her. Belbo resents being treated as a suspect and points out that he is free to approach anyone. De Angelis apologizes, then explains that the police had reconstructed Ardenti’s movements during his final days in Milan. A year after Ardenti vanished, they had learned by chance that someone saw him leaving the Picatrix offices with the psychic.

Belbo tells De Angelis that he was struck by the medium’s reference to six seals, a detail he remembers from Ardenti. The exchange turns Belbo’s memory itself into a point of suspicion. De Angelis observes that, two years earlier, Belbo had described only vague talk of Templar treasure, and Belbo replies that seals seemed unremarkable: treasures commonly had them. De Angelis presses the inconsistency, asking why the phrase had caught Belbo’s attention if it was so ordinary. He proposes a straightforward source: Ardenti may have told the medium his fantasies, perhaps hoping to use her for astral contact, and Picatrix’s reading may have reinforced those ideas. In De Angelis’s account, an earnest but psychologically vulnerable medium could repeat impressions acquired earlier without any occult transmission or murder behind the episode.

Disappearance and Competing Explanations

Two days later, De Angelis visits Belbo’s office with news. When he went to see the medium the day after the ceremony, she was gone. Neighbors had seen neither her nor her companion since the afternoon before the séance. The apartment had been ransacked: sheets and pillows were displaced, newspapers trampled, drawers emptied. Neither the medium nor the man Belbo calls her boyfriend or roommate was there.

De Angelis warns Belbo that the disappearance looks serious. He sees two possible triggers: someone may have discovered that the police were watching the woman, or someone may have noticed Belbo trying to question her. Either way, the words spoken in the trance might have touched on unfinished business. His warning places Belbo uncomfortably close to the case: the police could suspect that he had killed her. Yet the letter ends without resolving what happened, keeping the medium’s disappearance between an apparent crime and a missing-person explanation.

Belbo’s next letter offers a more ordinary conclusion. A police informer says the woman’s lover had become involved in a dispute over a drug shipment: he had sold the goods at retail instead of delivering them to the wholesaler who had already paid. In that world, such conduct invited retaliation, so the man disappeared to save himself and took the woman with him. De Angelis also finds Picatrix-style magazines in the apartment. Articles about Templar treasure, Rosicrucians, a hidden refuge, the phrase “post CXX annos patebo,” and the thirty-six invisibles are heavily underlined. The police explanation is that the medium had absorbed the same literature as Ardenti and repeated its themes while in a trance. The case is then closed and handed to the narcotics squad.

Retrospective Doubt and Narrative Significance

Belbo appears relieved by De Angelis’s economical account, but Casaubon later revisits it from a different frame of mind. He wonders whether the medium had repeated something from Ardenti that her magazines did not contain, something no one was supposed to know. In this imagined alternative, someone in Picatrix who had been involved in Ardenti’s disappearance notices Belbo’s attempt to question her and eliminates her; the lover is also removed, and an informer is instructed to make the pair’s disappearance look voluntary. Casaubon acknowledges that this would be simple only if there really were a plan. The thought arrives retrospectively, after he and his associates have invented the Plan and later watched reality seem to run ahead of their fiction.

The episode’s force lies in the competition between explanations, not in confirmation that either one is true. De Angelis connects the séance to printed materials, a drug dispute, and the couple’s flight; Casaubon’s later suspicion turns the same gaps into signs of coordinated suppression. That change in interpretation anticipates the group’s habit of connecting everything with everything else. The séance offers a vivid demonstration of how a suggestive performance, a remembered phrase, an empty apartment, and an unresolved disappearance can be assembled into a conspiracy—or left, more cautiously, as events whose connections remain unproved.