The Navel of the World

The Navel of the World is the imagined center at which the Plan’s earthly and celestial currents meet. In the conspiratorial system assembled by Casaubon, Jacopo Belbo, and Diotallevi, it is both a location the Pendulum might identify and a secret that seems to explain history. Yet the novel makes its force depend less on finding a real place than on the repeated act of connecting things: every clue can point onward, and the center remains just beyond confirmation.

The center imagined by the Plan

The Plan gives the Navel of the World a cosmic geography. In Jacopo Belbo’s account of the Nazis’ search for a hidden message, the Pendulum is supposed to locate the point beneath the earth’s concave vault where telluric currents converge. The hollow-earth theory then joins what lies below to what lies above: subterranean passages and the pattern of the stars become corresponding maps, while the Mystic Pole is identified with the Heart of the Earth. In this chain of substitutions, the Navel becomes the point where the underground world and the heavens would share a center. The theory does not merely propose a location; it makes one correspondence authorize the next, until a geographical claim appears to explain history and confer world dominion.

That imagined center is not fixed to one proven site. As the three men extend their account to Alamut, Jacopo Belbo asks whether the Pendulum might reveal that the Umbilicus Mundi is there. The possibility is immediately left hanging rather than resolved. Alamut thus enters the Plan as a candidate, not a discovery: the question adds another link while preserving the center’s uncertainty.

A geography made by connections

The idea of the Navel gains apparent substance through the men’s method of association. Their work begins as a knowingly exaggerated game, assembled from extraordinary shortcuts that they believe they are parodying. During the long intervals between their meetings, however, they keep collecting evidence and connecting one subject to another until the habit becomes automatic. Casaubon later distinguishes their different degrees of absorption: he becomes addicted to the game, Diotallevi is corrupted by it, and Jacopo Belbo is converted. All three gradually lose the ability to distinguish resemblance from identity and metaphor from reality.

The Navel is an especially potent product of that method because a center can make a network look like a single design. A machine’s accumulators become instruments for the Thirty-six Invisibles, imagined as secretaries communicating across the globe and listening for tremors in a universal current. On this account, wars and political upheavals provide cover for hidden operators seeking echoes from the world’s center. The passage turns the material world into evidence for the same imagined system: a device for measuring currents, a possible signal, and events across history all acquire a common purpose because the Plan connects them.

Conspiracy as a self-confirming system

The novel sets this fabricated geography beside the political history of conspiracy accusations. Diotallevi proposes that a secret society might exist whose plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. This formulation shifts attention from the alleged hidden center to the social work performed by the belief in one. Failures can be blamed on others, while political leaders can bind supporters by supplying an external enemy. The alleged Navel belongs to this larger logic: it promises that uncertainty can be traced back to a hidden source and made legible as intention.

The account of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion shows how dangerous such interpretive habits become when attached to actual groups. The text describes contradictory political aims as parts of one program, and its claims are treated by the three men as evidence in their invented history. Their discussion reconstructs a chain of textual borrowing and political manipulation: a pamphlet derived from Maurice Joly’s attack on Napoleon III is recast through later conspiracy narratives, then attributed to Jews. In the men’s own further invention, Rachkovsky alters a text associated with Elie de Cyon by substituting Jews for Witte, helping to produce the forged account. The novel presents these allegations as the products and instruments of antisemitic fabrication, not as proof of a Jewish conspiracy. The search for an all-explaining center can thus recycle falsehoods and turn prejudice into apparently connected evidence.

The secret that recedes

The Plan’s central paradox is that its makers insist on connection even when the connection has no independent basis. They declare that admitting even one fact outside mystery would violate hermetic thought, then fold an arbitrary fact into the system. Their axiom that the Templars have something to do with everything expresses the method in its most extreme form. The more the men practice it, the harder it becomes to treat their supposed center as a joke rather than a reality.

The Plan also becomes real in a different, social sense. Its inventors create a nonexistent design, but its believers identify fragments of their own confused mythologies with the invented structure and imagine themselves to have belonged to it all along. Once others act on the Plan, it acquires consequences, and more believers go searching for its map. The Navel is therefore not simply an imaginary point on a map: it is the center produced by the desire to make scattered events answer to one hidden explanation.

That desire converges on Jacopo Belbo’s refusal to disclose the secret he claims to possess. The more he denies having it, the more his captors believe that it must be real and immense. Their search has held them together across conflict and division, but disclosure threatens both disappointment and the end of the secrecy on which their group’s power depends. The novel’s account of an “empty secret” clarifies the pattern: a secret remains potent because every answer opens another interpretive path. The Navel of the World can be sought everywhere precisely because no final discovery establishes where it is.