Xin Atlantis

New Atlantis is Francis Bacon’s work of imagined learning and invention, but in the novel it acquires a second life as a document recruited into the conspirators’ account of hidden history. Its House of Solomon, a place for collecting human inventions, becomes a link in a chain joining Bacon to Rosicrucian and Templar traditions and, eventually, to the modern Conservatoire where Foucault’s Pendulum stands. The novel distinguishes the book’s textual facts from the Plan’s increasingly confident, often fabricated interpretations of them.

Bacon, Rosicrucianism, and the Plan

The conspiratorial history presented by the characters makes Bacon the successor to John Dee and a central figure in the supposed English Templar circle. The narrative itself marks the gap between evidence and assertion: Bacon did not, strictly speaking, mention the Rosicrucians by name in New Atlantis. Instead, John Heydon later rewrote the work as The Holy Land and inserted them. The conspirators dismiss that distinction, treating the later interpolation as though it authorized a claim about Bacon’s original text. The move exemplifies their method: a resemblance or later association is promoted into proof of an ancient connection.

Bacon’s supposed importance is also attached to political and ceremonial events. The account links him to efforts to strengthen relations between English and German circles and to the 1613 marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of James I, to Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. After Rudolf II’s death, the conspiratorial narrative shifts its imagined center from Prague to Heidelberg; it describes the wedding celebrations as rich in Templar allegory and casts Bacon as the organizer of a performance of mystical knighthood. These claims turn New Atlantis from an isolated literary work into one piece of a purported succession, with Bacon placed after Dee as a grand master of an English Templar group.

The book’s own language supplies an especially useful point of attachment. Its House of Solomon is described as a place where mankind’s inventions are collected. In the Plan’s logic, that institution can be made to signify not simply a program of learning but a hidden center of power and knowledge. The conspirators’ interpretation thus depends on a productive slippage: the work’s imagined institution is treated as a clue to the secret organization they already expect to find.

The House of Solomon and the Conservatoire

The novel gives the connection a material counterpart in Paris. Casaubon points out that a prior of Saint Albans had also been abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the abbey later occupied by the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He then cites two Convention measures from the same year: one authorized the public-education committee to print Bacon’s complete works; another provided for a house of arts and trades modeled on the House of Solomon in New Atlantis, where human inventions would be gathered.

Belbo draws the connection to the object that anchors the novel’s plot: Foucault’s Pendulum is installed in the Conservatoire. In this sequence, the book’s imagined repository, the actual institution devoted to arts and trades, and the pendulum occupy successive positions in a chain of interpretation. The historical measures establish a real association between Bacon and the institution as the characters describe it; the conspiratorial leap is to make that association part of the Plan. The resulting effect is not a simple revelation that the Plan is true, but a demonstration of how a credible link can be extended until it appears to confirm an entire hidden history.

A text repeatedly rewritten

The story’s method of rewriting New Atlantis recurs in its treatment of other political and conspiratorial documents. The characters discuss the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a fabricated text assembled through the circulation and alteration of earlier material. Their account traces its supposed lineage through Maurice Joly’s dialogue against Napoleon III, a document attributed to Sue, and the work of people who redirect existing political accusations toward new targets. In their speculative reconstruction, Rachkovsky alters a pamphlet associated with Elie de Cyon by substituting Jews for Witte, helping produce a text that can be circulated as proof of the very conspiracy it invents.

This pattern illuminates the earlier treatment of Bacon’s book. Heydon’s insertion of Rosicrucians into a rewriting of New Atlantis is not the same kind of political forgery, but it performs a related operation: later material is folded into an earlier text, and the altered version is then used to support claims about the past. The novel’s conspirators repeatedly blur original text, adaptation, quotation, and conjecture. That instability is central to the Plan’s appeal: a document need not say exactly what they claim if another document, later edition, or supposed historical connection can be recruited to make it seem as though it did.

Invention, power, and historical harm

The novel sharply exposes the political danger of this interpretive machinery when the conversation turns to antisemitic conspiracy. The characters describe the Protocols as a set of twenty-four declarations that combines contradictory prescriptions: it condemns liberalism while recommending its use to foment disorder, and it depicts schemes for controlling governments, provoking war, and manipulating social conflict. The text’s contradictions do not stop its use as a political weapon. Instead, its fabricated authority allows prejudice to present itself as the discovery of a hidden design.

The same danger becomes stark when a character extends the Plan to the Nazi genocide of European Jews. He falsely recasts the bureaucratic procedures of persecution and murder as a search for a concealed clue supposedly needed to locate telluric currents and the center of a hollow Earth. This is not presented as historical explanation but as an extreme instance of the Plan’s capacity to appropriate any event as confirmation. The claim converts mass suffering into evidence for a fantasy and shows how conspiratorial pattern-making can erase the reality of its victims.

Against that destructive use, New Atlantis remains a point where the novel’s fictional and historical registers meet. Its House of Solomon connects a literary vision of collected invention to a real Paris institution; later rewritings and the characters’ conjectures then load that connection with secret political meaning. The book’s significance lies not in proving the Plan, but in revealing how texts acquire authority through adaptation, selective reading, and the desire to make every historical fragment belong to one story.