Information on the Knights Templar

The Templar message is a conjectured, many-part revelation designed to guide later successors to the Umbilicus Telluris, or Earth’s navel. In the researchers’ version of the Plan, its essential secret is not simply the location of a point beneath the earth, but the identity of the map required to find that point. The message therefore becomes both a fictional Templar artifact and a compact expression of the Plan’s interpretive machinery: fragments, maps, and historical names can be made to connect, but their apparent coherence depends on the system used to read them.

Purpose and Distribution

The imagined Templars had learned the location of the Umbilicus Telluris but, in the researchers’ account, could not yet exploit what they knew. They supposedly organized the Plan so that successors, arriving when the necessary technology became available, could recover the revelation. The information was distributed among thirty-six people scattered around the world, rather than preserved as a single, direct statement. That division raises a practical problem within the fiction: a message in many parts must be assembled, and no individual fragment should disclose the whole secret.

A straightforward map would defeat that purpose. If it marked the Umbilicus with an X, the holder of that one piece could identify the location without needing the others. The researchers therefore imagine a more elaborate message, one that leads not directly to a marked point but through a sequence of instructions and references. Its complexity is presented as intentional security, while also giving the three men room to devise further connections whenever the theory needs them.

The Pendulum and the Choice of Map

Abulafia supplies a sequence of cryptic statements: Guillaume Postel dies in 1581; Francis Bacon is Viscount St. Albans; and the Conservatoire contains Foucault’s Pendulum. The researchers decide that the Pendulum must have a function in the Templar revelation. They connect it to a conjecture about cathedral builders, who supposedly inferred the earth’s rotation from a plumb line suspended beneath a vault, and then read the labyrinth under the Pendulum as a schematic of subterranean currents. In this chain of reasoning, the instrument appears to link an architectural device, a map-like pattern, and the hidden geography the Plan requires.

The decisive refinement is that the message reveals which map to use. A twelfth-century T-shaped world map places Asia above, with Europe and Africa to either side; a map associated with Macrobius’s Somnium Scipionis gives the world a different arrangement, including the Antipodes. When the maps are oriented alike, the same coordinate can correspond to Arabia on one and New Zealand on the other. Knowing the Pendulum and its orientation would thus remain insufficient: without the correct map, a searcher could not know what the coordinates mean.

The proposed message consequently points not only to a location but to a manuscript and the library, abbey, or castle where the necessary map might be found. The researchers allow for the possibility that the map was specially made, later lost, stolen, or separated from the knowledge of its use. A surviving possessor might know that it was valuable without understanding why; someone who knew the instructions might be unable to locate it. The imagined history of the message expands into a history of missing objects, partial knowledge, mistaken readings, and false trails.

A Theory That Accommodates Every Trace

Once the map is missing, conjecture can stand in for evidence. The researchers consider whether a projection by Robert Fludd, whom they associate with the Rosicrucians, might serve as a map intended to lie beneath an ideal Pendulum suspended from an ideal keystone. Its distinctive projection, viewed from the mystic Pole, appears to them to fit the theory. The message can then be treated as a guide to a lost object, while any map-like image may be evaluated as a candidate for that object.

The notion that a map is not the territory clarifies the mechanism at work. Different maps assign different meanings to the same coordinate, so the message’s apparent precision cannot establish a location until the interpretive frame has been chosen. Yet the researchers turn this genuine ambiguity into a way of extending the Plan: if one map fails, another can be proposed; if the original has vanished, its traces can supposedly be reconstructed from correspondences. The missing map is therefore both the obstacle the message is designed to overcome and the absence that keeps its interpretation open-ended.

From Coded Message to Political Conspiracy

Elsewhere, the same project of reading scattered texts as connected evidence is applied to the Protocols. The researchers discuss its twenty-four declarations as a program attributed to the Elders of Zion, noting that its alleged aims contradict one another: it denounces liberalism while exploiting revolutionary ideas, and advocates both control and social disorder. In the Plan’s fictional genealogy, such inconsistencies do not discredit the text; they are made to fit a story of rival secret branches and competing political operations.

That account also narrates the document’s fabrication and circulation. The researchers connect its material to Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel and to later transformations that redirect accusations against political figures toward Jews. They then speculate that Peter Ivanovitch Rachkovsky altered a text found during a search of Elie de Cyon’s villa, substituting Jews for Witte and circulating it as evidence of a Jewish plot. The scene exposes how copied and repurposed material can acquire the authority of revelation when readers mistake repetition and resemblance for independent confirmation.

The method reaches its most disturbing extreme when the Plan is used to explain the Holocaust. One of the researchers invents the claim that the Nazi destruction of Jews was a search for the missing representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles and for a clue that would locate the telluric center. This is not evidence about the historical crime but a conspiratorial fabrication that converts mass murder into a piece of the researchers’ imagined puzzle. By carrying the logic of the coded Templar message into this false explanation, the novel shows how a system that treats every gap as a clue can turn historical suffering into material for an all-encompassing plot.

Significance

The Templar message is never established as a historical artifact; it belongs to the Plan the researchers construct. Its imagined design nevertheless provides the Plan with a compelling model: concealment through distribution, meaning dependent on a key, and a final location recoverable only by joining the fragments. The map requirement makes that model especially seductive, because it gives a plausible explanation for why apparently accurate information could still fail to reveal its destination.

At the same time, the message demonstrates the danger in the researchers’ procedure. Their initial distinction between coordinates and maps develops into a license to treat missing manuscripts, contradictory documents, political accusations, and atrocity as parts of one design. What begins as a puzzle about how to read information becomes a conspiracy logic in which no absence is allowed to remain unexplained and no coincidence need be left alone. The coded message thus signifies both the ingenuity of the Plan’s construction and its capacity to make invention look like discovery.