Abulafia's Combinatorial Method

Abulafia’s Combinatorial Method is a procedure for generating new texts by rearranging supplied words, lines, or fragments. Its decisive significance lies in the way it turns randomness into apparent revelation: the computer provides combinations, while its users supply the connective logic that makes those combinations look like evidence. What begins as an experiment in literary permutation becomes a model for how the Plan can be assembled from unrelated scraps and then mistaken for discovered truth.

Mechanism and Demonstration

The method is introduced through a practical problem: Gudrun is asked to restore scattered manuscripts, but the narrator fears that she will put the wrong pages in the wrong folders. Belbo jokes that such disorder could produce different, eclectic books; the narrator counters that random assembly would merely replace the cabalists’ millennia-long search for the right combination with a monkey at a typewriter. The computer, Abulafia, might do the work more efficiently, but the underlying problem remains: a mass of possible arrangements does not itself identify a meaningful one.

Belbo explains that the program can hold up to two thousand entries and needs only data and a desire to generate something from it. For a poem, a user chooses the number of lines—ten, twenty, or a hundred—and the program randomizes their order, producing a fresh arrangement each time. Belbo has entered lines such as “And the linden trees quiver,” “Thou sinister albatross,” “The rubber plant is free,” and “I offer thee my life.” The results include disconnected images and declarations, among them “I count the nights, the sistrum sounds....” and “The hoopoe awaits me, / And the linden trees quiver.” Their repetitions can feel poetically apt without having been composed according to a deliberate poetic design.

Diotallevi recognizes the method’s resemblance to temurah, the recombination of verses associated with the Torah. If the entire Torah were entered and randomized, he suggests, Abulafia might perform an authentic version of that combinatorial practice; Belbo replies that such an undertaking would take centuries. The analogy establishes both the attraction and the limit of the machine: it can rearrange a vast textual inheritance, but the work of deciding what the rearrangements mean remains human.

From Random Text to the Plan

The group then shifts from poetry to the works of the Diabolicals. Rather than feed the program an entire sacred text, the narrator proposes entering a few dozen notions—such as the Templars fleeing to Scotland or the Corpus Hermeticum arriving in Florence in 1460—along with connective phrases such as “It’s obvious that” and “This proves that.” The program could yield a seemingly revelatory account; its users could fill in the gaps and call its repetitions prophecies. The crucial operation is not the randomization alone but the addition of bridges that transform juxtaposition into apparent causation.

Belbo welcomes the proposal, but the work is postponed until the next day—or not. He insists on beginning immediately, asking the others to pick up twenty pages lying on the floor, glance at the first sentence on each, and treat each as an entry. When the group objects to including the sentence “Minnie Mouse is Mickey’s fiancee,” Belbo argues that excluding even one fact would violate hermetic thought. He adds the axiom “The Templars have something to do with everything,” which Diotallevi accepts. A principle that permits no irrelevant fact makes the method effectively inexhaustible: every fragment can be admitted, and every accidental proximity can be made consequential.

Belbo stays after the others leave, asking Gudrun to collect the papers from the floor. Her disordered gathering supplies the randomization more effectively than any computer could. The next morning he is radiant and declares that the experiment works beyond their expectations. The machine’s absence from the decisive operation sharpens the joke: the computer has become the name for a method that can be carried out by shuffled paper, provided its users are prepared to read the result as meaningful.

Interpretation and Self-Confirmation

The printout begins with the assertion that the Templars have something to do with everything and includes the warning “What follows is not true.” The warning does not halt interpretation. Belbo argues that Diotallevi has failed to see the connections and points to a question that recurs twice: who was married at the feast of Cana? He treats repetition as a magic key, then turns the collected fragments into an elaborate account: Jesus was not crucified; the Templars’ rejection of the Crucifix conceals that truth; Jesus, rather than the Grail, came to France; and the wedding at Cana was Jesus’s marriage to Mary Magdalene. From there Belbo links Jesus to the King of the World, the Rosicrucians, the eternal feminine, and the royal line of France.

The interpretation demonstrates the method’s recursive logic. The program or the scattered pages provide repetition and adjacency; Belbo supplies a framework in which those formal features count as clues. Once every detail is allowed to reveal a mystery, an apparent pattern can support further inferences without an independent test of whether the initial connections are true. The warning that the output is not true is absorbed into the process rather than treated as a reason to stop. Compilation itself becomes a claim to privileged knowledge: Belbo asserts that an initiate has the right to compile the truth.

Abulafia’s combinatorial procedure therefore serves as a miniature of the Plan’s larger construction. It does not uncover a hidden order through computation; it makes the production of order visible. Random fragments become a narrative when a reader supplies connective phrases, treats repetition as evidence, and refuses to leave any fact outside the design. The result can feel more persuasive as it grows more elaborate, not because the evidence has become stronger, but because each new interpretation creates another connection for the next one to confirm.