Solomon's House

The House of Solomon is the research institution described in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, imagined as a place where human inventions are collected. In the novel, it becomes a bridge between Bacon’s utopian vision, the historical founding of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and the conspiratorial fantasy that knowledge of hidden forces could be stored and used to command the world.

Bacon’s institution and its afterlife

The House of Solomon enters the narrative through a feverish historical fantasy about Bacon. In that account, Bacon, called Verulam, has been released from prison and has supposedly regained the monarch’s favor through magic. He is imagined spending his nights at Pilad’s Pub, using an astral machine that consumes small spheres racing through infinite worlds. The machine’s play becomes a grotesque instrument of inquiry: Bacon supposedly acts out the movements of celestial orbs in order to penetrate the secrets of the Great Establishment and the House of Solomon, which he calls Gottlieb’s. The fantasy turns a learned institution into the imagined destination of an occult quest.

The passage’s elaborate associations do not establish facts about Bacon; they reveal how the novel’s conspiratorial imagination absorbs historical names and inventions into a single, unstable pattern. Bacon’s research house is at once a repository of knowledge and a possible seat of power. Its collection of inventions invites the fantasy that accumulated knowledge might disclose a master key to the world.

The Conservatoire as a modern counterpart

The House of Solomon acquires a material counterpart when Casaubon points out the connections between Bacon and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He recalls that the Conservatoire was conceived as a homage to Bacon: the Convention authorized the printing of Bacon’s complete works and separately provided for a house of arts and trades modeled on the institution in New Atlantis, where all human inventions would be collected.

This historical association makes the Conservatoire more than a convenient setting. It embodies the House of Solomon’s collecting principle in a modern institution devoted to human arts and inventions. The link becomes decisive when Belbo observes that Foucault’s Pendulum is installed there. The sequence joins Bacon’s imagined center of knowledge to the pendulum’s physical location, giving the group’s speculative pattern a striking convergence of text, institution, and object.

Knowledge, technology, and the Plan

The House of Solomon also appears within the Plan’s imagined Templar history. The conspiratorial account claims that the Templars discovered how to exploit telluric currents, first replacing menhirs with Gothic cathedrals whose crypts supposedly contained Black Virgins in contact with radioactive strata. The cathedrals become a network of transmitting and receiving stations, while the Templars’ knowledge remains incomplete in practice: a gap separates knowing the secret from knowing how to use it.

In this account, the Templars supposedly organized the Plan so that successors in a later technological age could discover the location of the Umbilicus Telluris. The House of Solomon’s association with collected inventions supplies a suggestive counterpart to that delayed technological ambition: knowledge is preserved, but its full application must await the means to act on it. The parallel belongs to the characters’ invented system, not to an independently confirmed history. Within that system, the institution’s promise of universal knowledge becomes inseparable from the danger of mistaking a collection of inventions for a route to absolute power.