The Prague Cemetery

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/book-review-the-occult-truth-of-history-de9bcfff2d65

Umberto Eco loved the occult. His second book, Foucault's Pendulum, was about secret societies. His famous first book, The Name of the Rose, was about Aristotle's lost book on Comedy being hidden in a labyrinth. Even without a supernatural element, these stories about hidden things are “occult.”[1] Anyone who thinks that the world is run by a secret cabal of Jesuits or Jews is an “occultist.”

This interest fits naturally into Eco's career as an expert in semiotics. Semiotics is defined as:

A general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. 

In semiotics there is a sign and a meaning signified by the sign. Meaning is therefore occulted in some way by the sign. Thus, what is most important is not the surface thing we see and know but the thing hidden beneath the sign.

In The Prague Cemetery, Eco develops the Grand Unified Theory of Occultism. The main character is Simone Simonini, born in Piedmont in the early nineteenth century. Simonini is very quickly defined as an unsympathetic and repulsive character. He is universal in his bigotry. He does not limit himself to antisemitism; he despises Germans, Russians, Jesuits, Masons, and virtually everyone he encounters. He is a thoroughgoing misogynistic, despising women as women and shrinking from contact and association with women. The only thing he does not despise is money and food; he is greedy and fat.

Simonini is a forger and police informant. He learns the dark arts of how to befriend and entrap his friends, beginning with his college friends. He learns how to forge documents so that estates can be claimed. He also forges documents so that the state authorities can have conspiracies to blame things on. Eventually, Simonini's life takes him to Paris, where he creates the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and forges the transfer ticket that sends Dreyfus to Devil's Island.

Eco presents his story in an epistolary format. The book is structured as diary entries by Simonini and a correspondent named Abbe Dalla Piccola with whom Simonini had some underhanded dealings. It becomes clear that the response and counter-responses are from the same person. Early in the book, Simonini mentions how he had learned about the “talking cure” from “Froide.” Simonini loses time when Abbe Dalla Piccola writes his entries. In this way, Eco hides the truth from the protagonist. The book is occult on many levels.

Eco is a wonderful writer. His prose is elegant.

The truly amazing thing about The Prague Cemetery is its historical erudition. Apart from Simonini, every character in the book existed. The events described in the book, such as the Taxil Hoax, are historical. Eco adroitly weaves together historical events and historical personages to develop his story. If the reader pays attention, the reader will get an education in obscure, forgotten nineteenth-century European history.

Ultimately, The Prague Cemetery is a satire about secret services and conspiratorial societies. Simonini has connections with the conspiracies that convulsed the nineteenth century, including the Jesuits, the Masons, the Carbonari, the antisemitic, etc., and he is paid by the Piedmont/Italian, German, French, and Russian secret services. Ultimately, the conspiracies are weak affairs that seem to end up in the hands of an old misogynist.

That may be the point Eco is making. At the height of the exposure of the FBI's 2022/2023 efforts to concoct a vast right-wing conspiracy involving planting stories about extremist Catholic groups in the Atlantic magazine and using FBI informants to infiltrate radical-traditional Catholic masses, certain observations made by Eco ring true. For example, in this one, Simonini's handler is explaining how secret services handle conspiracies:

“You should know that the only way of controlling a subversive sect is by taking over its command, or at least having its ringleaders in our pay. You don't find out about the plans of enemies of the state by divine inspiration. Someone said, perhaps exaggerating, that out of every ten followers of a secret society, three of them are working for us as mouchards - please excuse the expression, but that is what they're commonly called - while six are fools who completely believe in what they're doing, and one man is dangerous.

Eco, Umberto. The Prague Cemetery (p. 213). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Apply that to the fake Whitmer kidnapping, which resulted in the exoneration of several defendants on the grounds of entrapment, and Eco's satire scores a point.

[1] A core meaning of “occult” is “secret.”