Jacopo Belbo—Diotallevi

Jacopo Belbo and Diotallevi are partners in the research and invention of the Plan: they gather esoteric documents, test connections among traditions, and construct a secret history that begins as parody but comes to shape the beliefs and conduct of its supposed adherents. Their relationship is intellectual and collaborative, yet its central consequence is dangerous: by repeatedly practicing the Plan’s way of joining disparate facts, both men become vulnerable to treating analogy as evidence and invention as reality.

A partnership in research

Diotallevi and Belbo share the work of turning miscellaneous historical and occult material into a usable body of data. When the narrator volunteers to research the subject, he spends a week among books, struggling to separate historical fact from Hermetic gossip and reliable information from fantasy. The result is a bewildering list of sects, lodges, and conventicles, with chronological coincidences that seem worth recording. He shows the document to his two accomplices, making the research explicitly collaborative rather than an individual pursuit.

The list becomes the basis for further inquiry. At a meeting in Pilade’s, the three present their gathered material to Aglie as information taken from the Diabolicals’ manuscripts. Aglie supplies a historical account of how Templar legend might have fused with Masonic traditions: persecuted Templars may have joined artisan confraternities, joining vengeance for Jacques de Molay to the Masons’ story of Hiram. The episode demonstrates the method of their partnership. They bring accumulated fragments to an authority who can add another connecting narrative, enlarging the network rather than testing whether each link is independently sound.

Their joint work also involves reading texts against their apparent meaning. The narrator describes reading the Rosicrucian manifestoes not to believe their stated claims but to look beyond them, assuming they conceal a coded message. Because he has no key, he assumes a grid must exist and reads with mistrust. This interpretive habit belongs to the shared project: the documents are not allowed to remain what they appear to be, but become evidence for a hidden history the researchers are trying to reconstruct.

From ironic method to manufactured secret

The pair’s collaboration produces a decisive speculative leap when the narrator studies telluric currents while staying at home with Lia after the baby’s birth. He reads his notes to Belbo and Diotallevi, and the three conclude that they can at last provide the Templars with a suitable secret. In their eyes, telluric currents offer an economical and elegant solution: they appear to make all the pieces of the millennial puzzle fit. The secret is not recovered from a proven historical source; it is assembled by joining one speculative explanation to another.

Their ease in making such connections rests on a distinction they believe they still control. When they exchange the results of their fantasies, they recognize that their associations are unwarranted and console themselves that they are parodying the Diabolicals’ reasoning. But the recurring practice changes them. As they collect material between plenary meetings, connecting everything to everything else becomes automatic. The narrator observes that there may be no real difference between acquiring the habit of pretending to believe and acquiring the habit of belief itself.

The narrator differentiates the three men’s responses to this gradual change. He considers himself the least affected, partly because daily life with Lia and the baby gives him another focus. Belbo, by contrast, is becoming consciously identified with the game, while Diotallevi is described as being trained viscerally to think like a Diabolical. The narrator summarizes their divergent trajectories as addiction, corruption, and conversion: he is becoming addicted, Diotallevi corrupted, and Belbo converted. Their shared enterprise thus does not produce identical inner changes, even as it draws all three toward the same confusion between metaphor and fact.

The logic of the Plan

The collaboration rests on a principle that makes it nearly impossible to stop. When one participant cautions against overdoing the interpretation, the narrator insists that even a single fact that reveals no mystery would violate Hermetic thought. Belbo adds the axiom that the Templars have something to do with everything, and Diotallevi agrees. In this exchange, the Plan’s rule is stated with comic clarity: no possible counterexample is permitted, because every detail must be made to confirm the hidden pattern.

The narrator later describes the broader social appeal of conspiracy as a response to frustration and failure. People who cannot explain a complex outcome may invent an enemy responsible for it; dictatorships, too, can use an external enemy to bind followers together. In the researchers’ case, this explanatory structure becomes a secret society whose supposed plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. The formulation is at once a joke and a demonstration of the Plan’s self-enclosing logic: even the claim that there is a conspiracy to invent conspiracies can be absorbed as further proof.

Belbo and Diotallevi’s work also makes clear how invention can become materially consequential. The narrator says that they invented a nonexistent Plan, yet its believers persuaded themselves they had been part of it for ages, identifying fragments of their own muddled mythology as episodes in its supposedly irrefutable web. Once those people act on the invented scheme and search for its map, the Plan exists in its effects, even if it never existed as the ancient design they imagine. Their research partnership therefore creates not merely a fictional account but a story capable of recruiting adherents and directing their actions.

Belief, secrecy, and the relationship’s consequence

The later reflections on the secret sharpen the danger implicit in the pair’s intellectual work. The narrator argues that conspiracy offers a secret that promises to dispel frustration or provide salvation, while a revealed secret is liable to disappoint. The search can continue indefinitely because each apparent answer opens another interpretive layer. This explains how a fabricated Plan can become compelling without ever yielding a final, verifiable content: its force lies partly in the promise that something more remains hidden.

That dynamic returns in the nocturnal rite before the Pendulum, when Belbo claims to possess a secret. The narrator understands that the claim gives Belbo power over the assembled group: they try to wrest the secret from him, and his refusal makes them believe it must be greater. The more he denies possessing it, the more they take the denial as confirmation. The episode recasts the partnership’s earlier work in a coercive setting. The same appetite for a hidden answer that helped the researchers construct the Plan now turns Belbo’s silence into evidence for his captors.

The narrator further suggests that the long search for this secret has held the group together despite excommunications, internal conflict, and coups. Its revelation threatens both disappointment and the end of secrecy itself. Aglie wants Belbo to confide in him alone, preserving his own mysterious authority, but Belbo refuses. In the surrounding confrontation, the accumulated logic of the Plan has outgrown the irony with which the research began. Belbo and Diotallevi’s relationship is therefore best understood through its shared intellectual history and its unequal consequences: together they helped make the web, but the habit of weaving it altered what each could believe, and ultimately placed Belbo’s refusal at the center of a lethal struggle over the secret.