"Eco, Umberto - Foucault's Pendulum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eco Umberto)

"Nonsense," they said. "You can always tell a genuine Piedmontese immediately by his skepticism."
"I'm a skeptic."
"No, you're only incredulous, a doubter, and that's different."
I knew why Diotallevi distrusted Abulafia. He had heard that word processors could change the order of letters. A test, thus, might generate its opposite and result in obscure prophecies. "It's a game of permutation," Belbo said, trying to explain. "Temurah? Isn't that the name for it? Isn't that what the devout rabbi does to ascend to the Gates of Splendor?''
"My dear friend," Diotallevi said, "you'll never understand anything. It's true that the Torah-the visible Jbrah, that is-is only one of the possible permutations of the letters of the eternal Torah, as God created it and delivered it to the angels. By rearranging the letters of the book over the centuries, we may someday arrive again at the original Torah. But the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest. And in an office! No, the Book must be murmured day after day in a little ghetto hovel where you learn to lean forward and keep your arms tight against your hips so there will be as little space as possible between the hand that holds the Book and the hand that turns the pages. And if you moisten your fingers, you must raise them vertically to your lips, as if nibbling unleavened bread, and drop no crumb. The word must be eaten very slowly. It must melt on the tongue before you can dissolve it and reorder it. And take care not to slobber it onto your caftan. If even a single letter is lost, the thread that is about to link you with the higher sefirot is broken. To this Abraham Abulafia dedicated his life, while your Saint Thomas was toiling to find God with his five paths.
"Abraham Abulafia's Hokhmath ha-Zerufvtas at once the science of the combination of letter and the science of the purification of the heart. Mystic logic, letters whirling in infinite change, is the world of bliss, it is the music of thought, but see that you proceed slowly, and with caution, because your machine may bring you delirium instead of ecstasy. Many of Abulafia's disciples were unable to walk the fine line between contemplation of the names of God and the practice of magic. They manipulated the names in an effort to turn them into a talisman, an instrument of dominion over nature, unaware-as you are unaware, with your machine-that every letter is bound to a part of the body, and shifting a consonant without the knowledge of its power may affect a limb, its position or nature, and then you find yourself deformed, a monster. Physically, for life; spiritually, for eternity."
"Listen," Belbo said to him then. "You haven't discouraged me, you know. On the contrary. I have Abulafia-that's what I'm calling him-at my command, the way our friends used to have the golem. Only, my Abulafia will be more cautious and respectful. More modest. The problem is to find all the permutations of the name of God, isn't it? Well, this manual has a neat little program in Basic for listing all possible sequences of four letters. It seems tailor-made for YHVH. Should I give it a whirl?" And he showed Diotallevi the program; Diotallevi had to agree it looked cabalistic:
10 REM anagrams
20 INPUT L$(1), L$(2), L$(3), L$(4)
30 PRINT
40 FOR I1 = 1 TO 4
50 FOR I2 = 1 TO 4
60 IF I2 = I1 THEN 130
70 FOR I3 = 1 TO 4
80 IF I3 = I1 THEN 120
90 IF I3 = I1 THEN 120
100 LET I4 = 10-(I1+I2+I3)
110 LPRINT L$(I1);L$(I2);L$(I3);L$(I4)
120 NEXT I3
130 NEXT I2
140 NEXT I1
150 END
"Try it yourself. When it asks for input, type in Y, H, V, H, and press the ENTER key. But you may be disappointed. There are only twenty-four possible permutations."
"Holy Seraphim! What can you do with twenty-four names of God? You think our wise men hadn't made that calculation? Read the Sefer Yesirah, Chapter Four, Section Sixteen. And they didn't have computers. 'Two Stones make two Houses. Three Stones make six Houses. Four Stones make twenty-four Houses. Five Stones make one hundred and twenty Houses. Six Stones make seven hundred and twenty Houses. Seven Stones make five thousand and forty Houses. Beyond this point, think of what the mouth cannot say and the ear cannot hear. ' You know what this is called today? Factor analysis. And you know why the Tradition warns that beyond this point a man should quit? Because if there were eight letters in the name of God, there would be forty thousand three hundred and twenty permutations, and if ten, there would be three million six hundred twenty-eight thousand eight hundred, and the permutations of your own wretched little name, first name and last, would come to almost forty million. Thank God you don't have a middle initial, like so many Americans, because then there would be more than four hundred million. And if the names of God contained twenty-seven letters - in the Hebrew alphabet there are no vowels, but twenty -two consonants plus five variants- then the number of His possible names would have twenty-nine digits. Except that you have to allow for repetitions, because the name of God could be aleph repeated twenty-seven times, in which case factor analysis is of no use: with repetitions you'd have to take twenty-seven to the twenty-seventh power, which is, I believe, something like four hundred forty-four billion billion billion billion. Four times ten with thirty-nine zeros after it."
"You're cheating, trying to scare me. I've read your Sefer Yesirah, too. There are twenty-two fundamental letters, and with them-with them alone-God formed all creation."
"Let's not split hairs. Five, at this order of magnitude, won't help. If you say twenty-two to the twenty-second power instead of twenty-seven to the twenty-seventh, you still come up with something like three hundred and forty billion billion billion. On the human scale, it doesn't make much difference. If I counted one, two, three, and so on, one number every second, it would take me almost thirty-two years to get to one lousy little billion. And it's more complicated than that, because cabala can't be reduced to the Sefer Yesirah alone. Besides which, there's a good reason why any real permutation of the Torah must include all twenty-seven letters. It's true that if the last five letters fall in the middle of a word, they are transformed into their normal variant. But not always. In Isaiah 9:2, for instance, there's the word "LMRBH," lemarbah-which, note the coincidence, means to multiply-but the mem in the middle is written as a final mem."
"Why is that?"
"Every letter corresponds to a number. The normal mem is forty, but the final mem is six hundred. This has nothing to do with temurah, which teaches permutation; it involves, rather, gematria, which seeks sublime affinities between words and their numeric values. With the final mem the word "LMRBH" totals not two hundred and seventy-seven but eight hundred and thirty-seven, and thus is equivalent to ThThZL, or thath zal, which means 'he who gives profusely.' So you can see why all twenty-seven letters have to be considered: it isn't just the sound that matters, but the number too. Which brings us to my calculation. There are more than four hundred billion billion billion billion possibilities. Have you any idea how long it would take to try them all out, using a machine? And I'm not talking about your miserable little computer. At the rate of one permutation per second, you would need seven billion billion billion billion minutes, or one hundred and twenty-three million billion billion billion hours, which is a little more than five million billion billion billion days, or fourteen thousand billion billion billion years, which comes to a hundred and forty billion billion billion centuries, or fourteen billion billion billion millennia. But suppose you had a machine capable of generating a million permutations per second. Just think of the time you'd save with your electronic wheel: you'd need only fourteen thousand billion billion millennia!
"The real and true name of God, the secret name, is as long as the entire Torah, and there is no machine in the world capable of exhausting all its permutations, because the Torah itself is a permutation with repetitions, and the art of temurah tells us to change not the twenty-seven letters of the alphabet but each and every character in the Torah, for each character is a letter unto itself, no matter how often it appears on other pages. The two hes in the name YHVH therefore count as two different letters. And if you want to Calculate all the permutations of all the characters in the entire Torah, then all the zeros in the world will not be enough for you. But go ahead, do what you can with your pathetic little accountant's machine. A machine does exist, to be sure, but it wasn't manufactured in your Silicon Valley: it is the holy cabala, or Tradition, and for centuries the rabbis have been doing what no computer can do and, let us hope, will never be able to do. Because on the day all the combinations are exhausted, the result should remain secret, and in any case the universe will have completed its cycle-and we will all be consumed in the dazzling glory of the great Metacyclosynchro-tron."
"Amen," Jacopo Belbo said.
Diotallevi was already driving him toward these excesses, and I should have kept that in mind. How often had I seen Belbo, after office hours, running programs to check Diotallevi's calculations, trying to show him that at least Abu could give results in a few seconds, not having to work by hand on yellowing parchment or use antediluvian number systems that did not even include zero? But Abu gave his answers in exponential notation, so Belbo was unable to daunt Diotallevi with a screen full of endless zeros: a pale visual imitation of the multiplication of combinatorial universes, of the exploding swarm of all possible worlds.

After everything that had happened, it seemed impossible to me, I thought as I stared at the Rosicrucian engraving, that Belbo would not have returned to those exercises on the name of God in selecting a password. And if, as I guessed, he was also preoccupied with numbers like thirty-six and one hundred and twenty, they would enter into it, too. He would not have simply combined the four Hebrew letters, knowing that four Stones made only twenty-four Houses.
But he might have played with the Italian transcription, which contained two vowels. With six letters-lahveh-he had seven hundred and twenty permutations at his disposal. The repetitions didn't count, because Diotallevi had said that the two hes must be taken as two different letters. Belbo could have chosen, say, the thirty-sixth or the hundred and twentieth.
I had arrived at Belbo's at about eleven; it was now one. I would have to write a program for anagrams of six letters, and the best way to do that was to modify the program I already had written for four.
I needed some fresh air. I went out, bought myself some food, another bottle of whiskey.

I came back, left the sandwiches in a corner, and started on the whiskey as I inserted the Basic disk and went to work. I made the usual mistakes, and the debugging took me a good half hour, but by two-thirty the program was functional and the seven hundred and twenty names of God were running down the screen.
iahueh

iahuhe

iahtuh

iahehu

iahhve

iahhev