Guillaume Postel

Guillaume Postel is a French scholar and religious visionary whom Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi install as the French grand master of their invented Templar Plan. In their reconstruction, his studies, travels, religious enthusiasms, and final years at Saint-Martin-des-Champs become clues to a hidden mission; his death before the imagined 1584 rendezvous supplies the Plan with both a missing participant and an explanation for its failure. The character’s importance lies not in proof that the conspiracy exists, but in showing how the conspiratorial mind can make a coherent history out of scattered facts.

Scholar and Religious Visionary

The account of Postel begins with a dense collection of intellectual pursuits. He studies Hebrew and tries to establish it as the common matrix of all languages; translates the Zohar and the Bahir; makes contact with Kabbalists; and proposes a plan for universal peace. He also tries to persuade the king of France to ally with the sultan, travels through Greece, Syria, and Asia Minor, and studies Arabic. Casaubon presents these activities as a route that retraces the itinerary of Christian Rosencreutz, though the parallel is a product of the group’s pattern-making rather than independent evidence of a shared mission.

Postel’s chosen name provides another link in their chain. He signs some writings Rosispergius, glossed as “he who scatters dew.” Casaubon connects the name to Gassendi’s claim in his Examen Philosophiae Fluddanae that Rosencreutz derives not from rosa, but from ros, or dew. A manuscript in which Postel speaks of a secret to be guarded until the right time is then linked to the warning against casting pearls before swine, which also appears on the title page of The Chemical Wedding. Each resemblance is made to confirm the others: a name, an etymology, a manuscript, and a printed phrase become parts of one supposed design.

The portrait also includes Postel’s extraordinary claims about royal legitimacy. He declares himself a direct descendant of Noah’s eldest son and reasons that, because Noah founded the Celtic race and thus Druid civilization, the king of France is the only legitimate claimant to the title King of the World. Casaubon emphasizes that Postel speaks of the King of the World centuries before d’Alveydre. The claim gives the group another apparent historical anticipation, although its force in the Plan comes from retrospective comparison.

The Plan’s French Grand Master

Casaubon’s reconstruction makes Postel the leader of a French group awaiting an appointment with its English counterpart. A further supposed link comes from Postel’s contact with Robert Fludd: Father Marin Mersenne, denouncing Fludd, calls him made of the same stuff as “atheus magnus Postel.” Casaubon also says that Postel and John Dee seem to have met in 1550, while speculating that they could not yet have known they were both grand masters of the Plan, destined to meet thirty years later. The distinction between the reported meeting and the invented significance attached to it is central to the episode’s comic logic.

Postel’s connection to the Jesuits supplies a proposed route by which the secret could have passed to another institution. In the group’s account, he joins Ignatius Loyola in Rome in 1554, drawn by mystical fervor and a desire for spiritual regeneration. Ignatius welcomes him, but Postel retains his Kabbalism, ecumenical outlook, and insistence that the king of France is the King of the World. The Jesuits cannot accept these beliefs, and a rupture follows: Postel either leaves or is expelled. Casaubon and his companions then imagine that his Jesuit vow of obedience compelled him to disclose his mission to Ignatius, allowing the Jesuits to learn of the Templar Plan. This is not established history within the account; it is an explanation the three invent because they need a more persuasive answer to how the Jesuits could know of the Plan.

The theory is self-consciously theatrical. Casaubon imagines Postel addressing Ignatius as the unworthy French representative of the Templar secret and folding the coming 1584 meeting into a pious Jesuit purpose. The imagined confession bridges the gap between Postel’s temporary membership and the group’s larger conspiracy, converting an uncertain institutional connection into a transmission of secret knowledge.

Saint-Martin and the Missed Rendezvous

Postel’s later life gives Casaubon the location and timetable for the French side of the Plan. In 1564, the year John Dee writes his Monas Hieroglyphica, Postel retracts his heresies and retires to Saint-Martin-des-Champs. Casaubon treats the monastery not as a retreat but as evidence that Postel is waiting there for 1584. The place consequently becomes, in the group’s reconstruction, a refuge where the Templars were safe and at home, and the site of the secret third meeting.

The chronology then turns Postel’s death into the cause of the supposed rendezvous’s failure. Casaubon declares him grand master of the French group, waiting for the English, but notes that he dies in 1581, three years before the appointed meeting. He concludes that the 1584 mishap occurred because a keen mind was missing: Postel, had he lived, could have understood the confusion caused by the calendars. The explanation converts an absence into evidence. Because Postel is not there to interpret the calendrical confusion, his death can be made to explain why the meeting supposedly failed.

Casaubon further connects the monastery to Francis Bacon. In the group’s account, Bacon becomes Viscount St. Albans in 1621 and discovers a mystery among his ancestral possessions; the year is also when he is accused of corruption and briefly imprisoned. Casaubon speculates that Bacon had unearthed something that frightened someone, came to understand Saint-Martin needed watching, and conceived the idea of placing his House of Solomon there as an experimental laboratory for discovering the secret. This extension of the theory makes Postel’s retreat part of a continuing chain of custody, linking the supposed French refuge to Bacon’s later project.

Invention, Habit, and Belief

Postel’s role belongs to a Plan assembled from coincidences and analogies, not to a stable historical account. The three investigators can recognize, at first, that their connections are unwarranted shortcuts and treat the exercise as parody. Yet their repeated work of collecting material and linking everything to everything else becomes habitual. Casaubon later distinguishes their degrees of involvement: he is becoming addicted, Diotallevi corrupted, and Belbo converted. The transformations differ, but all three are losing the ability to distinguish resemblance from identity and metaphor from reality.

That process explains why Postel is so useful to the Plan. His actual interests and movements offer a surplus of details that can be rearranged: Hebrew as a universal language, Kabbalistic study, travel in the East, a peace proposal, royal speculation, Jesuit contact, and retirement at a strategically useful monastery. The invented account does not need to discard those particulars. Instead, it changes their relations, treating each as confirmation of a secret design. Postel becomes not merely a person with unusual ideas but the hinge between the French group, the English rendezvous, the Jesuits, and the imagined refuge.

The book’s wider account of conspiracy describes the same mechanism: people who invent a nonexistent Plan can persuade others that it is real, until those others identify fragments of their own confused mythologies as episodes within it. Once people act on the invented design, the Plan acquires real effects, even though its supposed original unity was fabricated. Postel’s reconstructed biography is a miniature of that process. The chain is persuasive not because every link proves the next, but because each link has already been taught to look like part of the same pattern.