Rule One of the Plan

Rule One of the Plan is the rule of analogical connection: any concept may be linked to another because, in a world where everything can be associated with everything else, analogy has no immediate, decisive test of validity. It allows the Plan’s makers to turn an empty list into a chain that seems to lead somewhere—and, by circling back to its starting point, to confirm itself.

Definition and Function

Casaubon recalls the rules after accepting Lia’s explanation that the Provins message was merely a laundry list, not evidence of a Templar meeting or an actual Plan. The analogy that makes the method intelligible is a crossword puzzle with blank squares and no clues. But unlike an ordinary crossword, whose intersecting words must share letters, their game crosses concepts and events. Rule One supplies the first operation: connect one idea to another by analogy, without any settled way to judge whether the connection is sound.

How the Connections Work

The rule’s example begins with a potato and an apple, joined because both are vegetables and round. Biblical association takes the apple to a snake; resemblance of form carries the snake to a doughnut. The chain then runs from doughnut to life preserver, bathing suit, bathing, sea, ship, excrement, toilet paper, toilet, cologne, alcohol, drugs, syringe, hole, ground, and finally back to potato. The sequence moves freely among shared category, symbolic association, and likeness of shape. Each transition supplies the next link, even as the chain ranges far from its starting point.

The Rule Within the Plan

Rule One works with the other two rules rather than proving anything on its own. Rule Two accepts a chain if everything holds together at the end: the route from potato back to potato therefore passes the test on its own terms. Rule Three requires connections to have been made before, preferably often, so that familiar associations appear obvious rather than invented. Together, the rules transform unrestricted analogy into a procedure that can mistake coherence and prior repetition for evidence.

The method’s force lies in its openness: because almost any pair of things can be connected through some association, no link is excluded at the outset. Its apparent rigor comes later, when the chain closes and its links feel recognizable. In the light of Lia’s explanation, the procedure does not uncover the hidden Templar history the investigators expected to find; it shows how they could construct one from an empty list by connecting concepts until the pattern seemed to confirm itself.