The Creation of Abulafia | Veit's Blog
Veit's Blog
The Creation of Abulafia
2026-08-16
In 1988, Umberto Eco published Foucault’s<br>Pendulum. In it, three editors at a Milan publishing house (Belbo,<br>Diotallevi, and Casaubon) spend their working days on manuscripts by<br>people they privately call the Diabolicals, self-financing occultists<br>who have discovered that the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits,<br>the Cathars, and the pyramids are all the same thing wearing different<br>hats1.
I read it in 2020, stuck at home, and marvelled at Eco’s vast<br>knowledge of literature, the occult, and also of computing.
Belbo owns a personal computer he calls Abulafia,<br>after a thirteenth-century kabbalist whose practice was permuting the<br>letters of the divine names. Belbo, being a modern man, does it in<br>BASIC, because despite what he and his colleagues might say, they are a<br>curious bunch. Eco even gives the listing for the first program Belbo<br>writes:
10 REM anagrams<br>20 INPUT L$(1),L$(2),L$(3),L$(4)<br>30 PRINT<br>40 FOR I1=1 TO 4<br>50 FOR I2=1 TO 4<br>60 IF I2=I1 THEN 130<br>70 FOR I3=1 TO 4<br>80 IF I3=I1 THEN 120<br>90 IF I3=I2 THEN 120<br>100 LET I4=10-(I1+I2+I3)<br>110 LPRINT L$(I1);L$(I2);L$(I3);L$(I4)<br>120 NEXT I3<br>130 NEXT I2<br>140 NEXT I1<br>150 END
Fig. 1: Abulafia, permuting the Name.
It’s a nice little program. The trick on line 100 is cute. It’s not<br>all that believable that someone would use such a sophisticated trick in<br>a first program, but let’s drop believability for a second.
In the end, the program calls LPRINT, and the revelation<br>comes out on paper.
There’s a bug in it, too, can you spot it? I’m sure the output would<br>reveal it to you quite quickly2.
Eventually the three of them get bored, or contemptuous, and decide<br>to generate a Diabolical book of their own. It’s really quite remarkable<br>because they know that the book is generated at random from the crank<br>manuscripts they feed it, but still decide to take the juxtapositions it<br>returns, connect them up, and a story unfolds (in truth, we’re already<br>in the middle of it, the book is about a lot of different things at<br>once).
Why am I telling you about this?
The ratchet
Belbo, Diotallevi, and Casaubon are not cranks. They are professional<br>skeptics. They know the Plan is made up, because they are the ones<br>making it up, and they keep saying so to each other, joke about it, the<br>whole thing.
But there is an insidious recursive mechanism that traps them anyway.<br>Neither smugness nor smartness is enough to save them.
Abulafia’s output is meaningless by construction, so anything<br>meaningful in it has to be supplied by a reader. They supply it as a<br>game, knowingly. But the game’s output is text, and text is exactly the<br>same kind of thing as the input, so it goes back in. The connection they<br>invented yesterday is available today, and you build on it for tomorrow.<br>And so the nonsense and the making-sense-of-it intertwine and grow<br>together until they are one and the same putrid flower.
The Plan they construct is also unfalsifiable in practice while<br>looking falsifiable in principle, as befits smart people who spend their<br>time around conspiracy theorists. Every fact fits, because it has to<br>fit, and if it doesn’t fit that’s because the Conspiracy tampered with<br>things, and it’s proof that you’re on the right track.
Casaubon’s partner Lia is the only person in the book who is not in<br>too deep, and she looks for a boring explanation. The cryptic document<br>that is the foundation to the whole edifice is a merchant’s list of<br>wares, she discovers. A glorified laundry list, nothing more.
But Belbo and his friends are in too deep, and facts won’t change a<br>goddamn thing, and it’s not clear that these are facts anyway. Their<br>exegesis is as good as mine, thankyouverymuch.
Diotallevi dies of cancer, which he takes to be a punishment for what<br>they did with words: “We’ve sinned against the Word, against that which<br>created and sustains the world”. Belbo dies hanged from the wire of the<br>pendulum, in the middle of a ritual turned violent, refusing to give up<br>a secret that does not exist.
With the right kind of cynicism it can be a funny book, but ours are<br>supremely post-funny times.
Abulafia answers
The machine in the novel is stupid. It’s a shuffler. It has no model<br>of Belbo and no memory of the Plan or of the Templars. Every act of<br>interpretation is performed by a human being. And noone once realizes<br>they’re reading tea leaves. Why?
Because it’s language, and language has meaning.
An LLM is better than a simple BASIC program, surely. If you hand it<br>your fragments, it will explain the pattern. It will use the register<br>you need, and it will sound damn convincing syntactically, even if<br>semantically it might end up being just a shuffler.
Crucially, however, it remembers the theory, across a conversation<br>and increasingly across sessions. And it picks up your vocabulary. If<br>you name your idea and use that name twice, it’s now sacred text for<br>this conversation.
And once your conversation partner, stiff and...