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[ Notes September 23 ]
I came from Rome yesterday, landed at Bratislava Airport and took a cab to Vienna. Checked in to Hotel Sacher and now I´m writing the first entries in this journal regarding my travels to Siena, Florence, Rome and Vienna. So far my idea is to travel in chronological order according to the Manuscript but I suspect I will have reason to return to some cities, which has already happened since I´ve already been to Rome.
The Cabin
Today I was out by the cabin at the clearing. Some villagers recognized the description and pointed me in the right direction. It was a small house with a large barn next door. Cabin down a lonely gravel road. I walked around the grounds. Everything was clean, didn´t look like someone´s been there for a long time. The curtains were drawn. No garbage. The grass was overgrown and the paint flaked on both the cabin and the barn. The barn was open. There was nothing in there. I walked around and felt the walls, looked at the hayloft. Just when I was leaving, I saw the sun shining into the rammed earth floor of one of the corners. Looked like tiny holes. Indeed, in the eastern corner of the barn there were several bullet holes in the bottom corner, just east of the gravel road. I´ve just read the Manuscript a few times, and I´m getting used to the language, but I still cannot understand how Coetzee could have known about this, given who supposedly fired the shots.
The Advertisement
Some other things, perhaps of less importance, that I´ve had time to check out is that last year Mr Iacobi placed a small advertisement in the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter which alluded to Steganographia´s cipher by Trithemius, it´s from the 1400s I think, and that he signed the advertisement with
[email protected]. I don´t understand why he used this method. Remarkably though, the ad is verbatim to what Coetzee wrote it in the Manuscript.
Thoth Fraternitatis
Giorgio (a good friend of Mario P at Corriere) who works in the Vatican at the APSA, Amministrazione del Patrimonio della Sede Apostolica, whom I met over lunch yesterday in Rome, has this morning sent me a picture via email to a court record of the curia from the year 1599. The court record is an interrogation of a man named Francesco Ranzoni with residence in Campo Marzio who was accused of having scrawled on a wall next to the Porta del Popolo. He stated that he received money from a man he didn´t know and didn´t get a good look at but he asked him to do graffiti which he signed Thoth Fraternitatis – Thoth´s Brotherhood, suggesting that at least they were known at this time. Coetzee obviously can have access to this too, and have drawn his own conclusions, but in either case it confirms the old Brotherhood's existence.
As for the letters from the turn of 1600, which are published in the Manuscript starting from chapter one, which are supposedly written by members of the esoteric Thoth Fraternitatis, Giorgio said that he recognized the letters but didn´t know much about it. He said he would check into it and get back to me.
Bellarmine & the Great Book
Giorgio would also check if the Great Doctor, as Giorgio insist upon calling him, Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmine, The General Inquisitor at the end of the 1500s, left a diary or journal, which was entitled ”Theatrum Festiva”, ”Montepulciano” or ”Theatrum Diabolus” or something to that effect, where he described his attempts to find Thoth Fraternitatis which, if I understand correctly, was the Catholic Church's worst enemy at the time. Giorgio would get back to me in a few days, he promised.
The Capitoline Hill
A contact at the Rome police has sent a picture from inside the Capitoline Hill and the allegedly huge hidden chamber inside the hill. It´s a picture he took with his iPhone and it´s taken without flash because he was in a situation he couldn´t use it. The picture is, which is also noticeable, of one of the walls of the chamber which is smattered with pictures. Right on one of the walls there was this symbol.