Popeyikanpai

The Popelicans are one of the names given to dualist heretics who spread through Italy and Provence, presented in Casaubon’s explanation as related to the Paulicians. Their importance to the novel lies less in a detailed account of their beliefs than in the role they acquire within the Plan: a historical label becomes a link in an imagined chain of Templar groups leading through the Balkans toward Jerusalem.

Names and Historical Connection

Casaubon introduces the Popelicans while explaining how dualist heretics spreading through Italy and Provence were called Popelicans, Publicans, or Populicans, names he connects to the Paulicians. He cites a Latin phrase indicating that they were also called Popelicans in French. In the discussion, the naming functions as a claimed historical bridge: a movement encountered in different places and under variant labels can be made to look like evidence of an enduring network.

The Paulicians, as Casaubon describes them, were a dualist Christian community associated with the Balkans. He recounts that the Crusaders encountered them near Antioch, where they fought alongside the Arabs, and at Constantinople, where the Paulician community of Philippopolis allegedly tried to deliver the city to the Bulgarian tsar Yoannitsa in defiance of the French. These episodes give Casaubon material for linking heretical communities to the Crusades, but the further claim of a secret relationship with the Templars belongs to his reconstruction, not to an independently established history in the passage.

Place in the Plan

Casaubon argues that the Templars, meeting Paulician communities during the Crusades, formed mysterious connections with them, just as he supposes they had connections with mystics and Muslim heretics. In his account, the route of the alleged Ordonation must pass through the Balkans. The Popelican or Paulician group thereby becomes the fifth group in a sequence leading from Germany toward Jerusalem.

The final link is the message’s instruction to go to the stone. Casaubon identifies the destination with the venerated rock at the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, on the site he associates with the Templars’ former temple. He speculates that a surviving, disguised Templar core group—or cabalists connected with the Portuguese—might have awaited the travelers there. The Popelicans’ assigned place in the Plan is therefore geographical as well as historical: their supposed Balkan position makes them a passage on the imagined route to the Jerusalem appointment.

Narrative Significance

The episode shows how the Plan converts resemblance and scattered historical references into an apparently economical explanation. The variant names, the Paulicians’ Balkan presence, and stories of Crusader encounters are assembled into a continuous chain; once assembled, the chain seems to confirm the very pattern used to construct it. Casaubon calls the result straightforward, but its coherence depends on treating conjectured connections as established links.

The Popelicans thus matter chiefly as a product of interpretive overreach. Their appearance marks the point where a heretical group described in a historical account is absorbed into the novel’s fabricated Templar system. The Plan does not simply preserve the past: it assigns the past a destination, making the Balkans a necessary stage between Germany and Jerusalem.