Jacopo Belbo—Casaubon

Jacopo Belbo and Casaubon are collaborators in the gathering and recombination of historical, occult, and documentary material that becomes the Plan. Their relationship is not simply a partnership in research: Belbo turns fragments into private fiction, while Casaubon supplies historical connections and increasingly reads the resulting pattern as real. The irony that begins their collaboration gradually weakens, until the practice of pretending to believe threatens to become belief itself.

Collaboration and Division of Labor

Belbo reports discoveries about the Rosicrucian period in deliberately abbreviated form, offering Casaubon and their other associate only the outline of his fantasies. He does not read them his pages and removes personal references; he also lets the others think that Abulafia supplied the connections. Casaubon later realizes that Belbo was creating a much richer narrative, mixing quotations with private myths. The opportunity to combine fragments from other stories had encouraged Belbo to write his own, a creative activity that he may have been testing as fiction or using to place himself inside the Great Story he was distorting.

Casaubon, in turn, contributes research and historical pattern-making. After Belbo mentions Francis Bacon as a possible author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes and identifies him as Viscount St. Albans, Casaubon connects that title with the prior of Saint Albans, whom he associates with Saint Bernard’s effort to legitimize the Templars. He extends the chain through Saint Alban’s British and Druid associations, Verulamium, and Bacon. The connection is characteristic of their shared method: a detail from Belbo’s report becomes the starting point for Casaubon’s further historical construction.

Documents, Copies, and Interpretation

The pair’s collaboration depends on documents whose authority is uncertain. Ardenti describes finding a handwritten sheet marked “Provins 1894” inside a heavy old volume while searching the books of Ingolf’s daughter. He conceals the paper from her, folds it into his pocket, and presents the discovery as evidence that Ingolf had taken the original parchment to Paris and left behind a copy. When he later offers the text to the group, he uses a photocopy to avoid further wear to the supposed original. Casaubon objects that Ingolf’s copy was not the original parchment; Ardenti answers that when originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original. For Casaubon and Belbo, the episode establishes an unstable documentary chain in which a copy’s status depends partly on the story told about what has disappeared.

The Rosicrucian manifestoes become another object of their interpretive work. Casaubon reads them not as straightforward calls for religious reform or as the life story of Christian Rosencreutz, but as a coded message that must be superimposed on a grid. Since he has no grid, he assumes one must exist. He then reads the texts as referring to the Plan of Provins, a hidden treasure, a promised historical change, and a future European government. The method does not merely decode the documents: it decides in advance that their apparent contradictions must conceal a different message.

From Research to the Plan

The collaboration also draws on Belbo’s ability to turn compilations into performances of explanatory mastery. When he presents material about pyramid measurements, Aglie recites numerical correspondences attributed to Piazzi Smyth: dimensions of the Great Pyramid are made to signify the length of the year and the distance from Earth to the Sun. He then exposes the looseness beneath this appearance of precision, noting that an unrounded calculation yields 3.1417254 rather than pi and recounting the allegation that Smyth chipped a granite wall to make his figures fit. The scene places the group’s pattern-seeking beside a conspicuous demonstration of how numerical coincidences can be manufactured or selectively defended.

Aglie offers the group another model for the Plan when he argues that electricity, radioactivity, and atomic energy are merely masks for a forgotten force, which he tentatively calls telluric currents. Later, Casaubon and his collaborators elaborate a theory in which Earth’s currents are affected by celestial spheres, seasons, and cosmic cycles. They imagine that locating the currents’ central point—the Navel of the World—would permit command of the planetary system. Such claims show how readily their research absorbs the language of measurement and physical force into an occult explanation.

The same process carries the Plan into increasingly extravagant historical territory. A theory of a hollow Earth, attributed in the account to Symmes, Teed, and a later German movement, is connected to Hitler’s supposed belief that the King of the World lived beneath the surface. The theory is then used to explain German territorial aims, the pursuit of the Pendulum, and even the Holocaust. Presented as part of the conspiratorial narrative rather than verified history, this chain shows the Plan’s capacity to convert incompatible claims and historical catastrophes into components of one total explanation.

The Game Becomes a Habit

Casaubon eventually recognizes that the group’s accumulation of correspondences has changed how its members think. Their associations had seemed so unwarranted that they would have been ashamed to claim that they truly believed them; they consoled themselves that they were parodying their Diabolicals’ reasoning. But repeated practice made connection automatic. Casaubon compares the transformation to spies who adopt an enemy’s habits of thought and to people who, by interpreting a dog as human, gradually become doglike themselves. In his retrospective account, the three men change differently: Casaubon becomes addicted, Diotallevi corrupted, and Belbo converted. The distinction between metaphor and literal identity grows harder to preserve.

Casaubon experiences that shift in his own reading. He finds himself admiring supposed correspondences between the Great Pyramid and astronomical distances, and between Celtic and Amerind mythologies. Houses, shop signs, clouds, and library engravings all begin to appear as surfaces concealing a deeper story. He describes the paradox as resembling Amparo’s condition: he does not believe, yet surrenders to the system. The collaboration has thus moved beyond shared research into a form of attention that makes almost any detail available as evidence.

Narrative Significance

The relationship between Belbo and Casaubon is both productive and dangerous because each man’s contribution strengthens the other’s. Belbo supplies imaginative recombination and private myth; Casaubon supplies historical links and a method for reading texts against an assumed hidden design. Their apparent irony does not protect them from the effects of repetition. As Casaubon’s retrospective account makes clear, the Plan is not only a construction they assemble from borrowed documents and associations; it becomes a habit of mind that reshapes the people assembling it.