Paul Pai

The Paulicians are a medieval Christian movement that Casaubon places at the center of the Plan’s imagined route from the Crusades to modern political conspiracies. In his account they spread across the Byzantine borderlands, encounter the Crusaders, and become a link between Templar history and later movements. The novel then pushes that historical sketch into increasingly fantastic claims: the Paulicians supposedly survive as a secret network, direct antisemitic fabrications, and even help explain the Holocaust. The distance between the fragmentary record and these sweeping assertions makes the group a key example of how the Plan converts uncertainty into apparent proof.

Historical Account and Doctrines

Casaubon introduces the Paulicians after rehearsing the tangled names and rival descriptions applied to religious groups in the medieval Middle East. He says that they followed a figure named Paul and were joined by iconoclasts expelled from Albania. From the eighth century onward, he describes their development from sect to community and political force. Byzantine emperors, alarmed by their growth, sent armies against them. Their settlements, in Casaubon’s account, extended toward the Euphrates and the Black Sea, and he claims that communities persisted into the seventeenth century, when Jesuits converted some, with others still surviving somewhere in the Balkans.

The doctrines attributed to them give Casaubon’s historical survey its theological focus. He describes their belief in one God in three persons alongside a defiant Demiurge who created the material world. They rejected the Old Testament and sacraments, despised the Cross, and did not honor the Virgin, because their account of Christ’s incarnation denied Mary’s ordinary maternal role. Casaubon also reports accusations that they worshiped the sun and the Devil and mixed children’s blood into bread and Eucharistic wine. He places such charges within a wider history of polemical descriptions of heretics, noting that the surviving knowledge of these groups comes largely through the gossip of their enemies. The distinction matters: the same hostile testimony that supplies the Plan with colorful details also makes the historical basis difficult to separate from accusation.

Casaubon connects the Paulicians to later groups through names that shift across regions and sources. He says that dualist heretics who spread through Italy and Provence were labeled Popelicans, Publicans, or Populicans to mark their supposed resemblance to the Paulicians. He then describes the Paulician leader Chrysocheir’s conflict with Byzantine Emperor Basil. After Chrysocheir’s capture and death, Basil was said to have fulfilled a vow by shooting three arrows at the leader’s severed head. The episode illustrates the violence of the conflict as Casaubon recounts it, but also the way the narrative gathers scattered reports into a continuous lineage of heresy and persecution.

Crusades and the Plan’s Route

In Casaubon’s reconstruction, the Paulicians become significant because the Crusaders encounter them near Antioch, where they are fighting alongside the Arabs, and later at the siege of Constantinople. He adds that the Paulician community at Philippopolis tried to hand the city to the Bulgarian tsar Yoannitsa in order to spite the French. These episodes provide the alleged historical contact through which the Templars could have encountered a network of religious dissidents.

Casaubon reverses the familiar direction of influence between Templars and Cathars: rather than the Templars borrowing from the Cathars, he proposes that the Templars’ encounters with Paulician communities helped shape the Cathars. He extends the hypothesis to the route of the Templar Ordonation, which, he argues, must pass through the Balkans. In the Plan’s proposed itinerary, the fifth group waiting along that route is Paulician; the sixth appointment lies in Jerusalem, at the sacred stone in the Mosque of Omar, on the site Casaubon associates with the former Templar Temple. He allows that the Jerusalem contact might have been disguised surviving Templars or a cabalistic group connected with the Portuguese, but presents the Balkan route as the logical passage from Germany. Belbo says he is persuaded, and Casaubon proposes the Bulgarian Bogomils as the Paulicians’ natural successors, while acknowledging that the Templars of Provins could not have foreseen Bulgaria’s later conquest by the Turks. The provisional chain nevertheless appears, to its makers, to make the Plan more economical and coherent.

From Medieval Sect to Modern Conspiracy

The Paulicians’ supposed later history expands as the three men keep joining fragments. Belbo claims that a Jerusalemite group eventually divided into three branches: one associated with Spanish and Provençal cabalists and neo-Templars, one with Baconian scientists and bankers, and a third established in Russia. In this imagined scheme, the Russian branch is Paulician, mystic and reactionary, aligned with landowners and infiltrated into the imperial court. Belbo sets it against Russian Jews, whom he describes as a literate community whose members entered liberal and revolutionary circles. The resulting story turns social and political differences into a secret conflict between rival inherited networks.

This invented genealogy is used to explain antisemitic propaganda. Diotallevi proposes that the late nineteenth-century campaign culminating in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a Paulician initiative. Belbo elaborates that the Russian branch sought to discredit Jews and thereby damage its supposed adversaries, the neo-Templars and Baconians. The text the men discuss is a series of twenty-four declarations attributed to the Elders of Zion, but its claims are contradictory: it attacks liberalism while recommending the use of liberal ideas to sow confusion, and it advocates both revolution and intensified inequality. It imagines control of governments, war, arms production, and even underground construction as parts of a world-conquest program. The men’s conspiracy reading converts these inconsistencies into evidence of a hidden strategy rather than treating them as reasons to question the document.

Casaubon’s account traces the alleged Plan through further layers of copying and appropriation. When the Jesuits see that Sue’s Les Mysteres du peuple attributes the Ordonation to them, he says, they exploit Simonini’s letter to attribute it instead to Jews. He then recounts how the Protocols’ text was found to derive from Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, a political pamphlet directed against Napoleon III, and how Joly’s arguments were themselves said by the conspiratorial narrators to have been copied from Sue. Rather than letting this chain of textual dependence dissolve the theory, Nesta Webster’s reasoning absorbs it: Joly becomes an initiate who knew the Plan, and the Plan is then attributed to the Templars because it appears to describe their supposed aims. The Paulicians serve as the connecting agent in this escalating reinterpretation, not as a conclusion supported by the documents.

The novel also supplies a more specific, but still speculative, story of how the Protocols might have been manufactured. Rachkovsky, a Russian secret-police officer, is said to have found a pamphlet associated with Elie de Cyon, adapted from Joly or Sue, and altered its political target by substituting Jews for Witte. In Belbo’s account, this forgery passes through Juliana or Justine Glinka to General Orgeievsky and eventually reaches the tsar. He casts Glinka as a Paulician agent and treats the document’s circulation as part of the group’s effort to persuade the tsar that Witte’s modernization program belonged to an international Jewish plot. The story ends by noting that Rachkovsky disappears from the record. That gap, instead of limiting the claim, becomes an opening for the suggestion that Saint-Germain may have assumed another identity.

The Plan’s Expansion and Its Consequences

The same method carries the Paulicians into the twentieth century. In the men’s construction, Hitler’s interest in hollow-Earth theories revives the search for a final map and the Pendulum’s hidden point. His military objectives are recast as attempts to reunite the six Templar groups: Paris is linked to the Pendulum and the Eiffel Tower, Portugal to the Portuguese group, and the invasions of the Balkans and Russia to Paulician territories. Belbo then asserts that, after Hitler’s attempt to secure an alliance with England fails, he turns against the Jews because he believes a dispersed Jerusalemite group possesses the missing part of the message.

The most consequential distortion follows when this Plan is made to explain the Holocaust. Belbo interprets the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews as a search for a secret clue supposedly carried by a representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles. He makes the bureaucratic procedures of genocide—detention, deprivation, searches, and the recording and sorting of possessions—serve as evidence for that fantasy. The resulting account is not a historical explanation but a grotesque act of conspiratorial appropriation: the real victims and mechanisms of Nazi persecution are subordinated to the men’s fabricated map and occult narrative. By inserting the Holocaust into the Plan, Belbo turns an invented theory into a frame that distorts and instrumentalizes historical atrocity.

A later turn places the Paulicians alongside the Assassins of Alamut. Belbo claims that, after the Battle of Lepanto, the Assassins waited until Islamic irredentism offered a new opening; their inclusion in the Plan is said to explain current events in the Persian Gulf. The proposed organization Tres, Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici is described either as a society seeking to reconcile spiritual orders of different faiths or, in Casaubon’s counter-reading, as one that might provoke conflict and exploit confusion. The exchange leaves the motive unresolved, but demonstrates the Plan’s elastic method: incompatible explanations can coexist because the act of connection matters more than proof.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The Paulicians’ role is shaped by a widening gap between historical uncertainty and interpretive certainty. Casaubon initially acknowledges that the record is fragmentary and often hostile. Yet the group becomes, in the men’s reconstruction, a continuous actor linking medieval heresy, Templar contacts, Russian politics, antisemitic propaganda, Nazism, and modern conflict. At each stage, an absence or ambiguity that might call for caution is converted into permission to connect more material. The narrative thus makes the Paulicians less a securely established secret organization than a measure of the Plan’s capacity to turn an incomplete record into a total explanation.

That process is inseparable from the men’s growing habit of conspiratorial thought. Casaubon later reflects that their knowingly extravagant associations became automatic through repeated practice: pretending to believe and believing ceased to be clearly distinguishable. He says he was less affected than Diotallevi and Belbo, partly because of his daily life with Lia and the baby; he describes Diotallevi as becoming corrupted and Belbo as becoming converted. The Paulician theory exemplifies that drift. What begins as playful reconstruction becomes a system capable of claiming that every apparent contradiction, missing source, or historical catastrophe confirms the same hidden design.

The novel finally exposes the self-reinforcing structure behind such explanations. The men invent a nonexistent Plan, yet their imagined adherents identify fragments of their own confused mythologies with it; once people act on the invented scheme, it acquires real consequences. The Paulicians’ attributed role in a secret society spreading rumors of universal conspiracy echoes this paradox: a plot may be fabricated, but belief in it can shape behavior and political life. The group’s narrative function is therefore double. It supplies a bridge across the Plan’s immense historical span, while revealing how conspiracy theories erase the boundary between a connection that can be demonstrated and one that merely satisfies the hunger for design.