Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco: Meaning, Conspiracy Thinking & Spiritual Discernment
Have you heard the famous Lao Tzu quote: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”?
I know firsthand that it works exactly like that. Over the last 5–7 years, every time I realized I was ready for the next step in my spiritual growth — and eventually, my new profession — a teacher or mentor I needed at that very moment would somehow magically appear.
I also believe this applies to books, especially when they are written by someone of Umberto Eco’s caliber.
Foucault’s Pendulum has been part of my library for 4 years and 3 months to the date (tell me I’m a nerdy nerd and a numbers person without telling me — yes, I checked the order date: September 13, 2021).
And yesterday, when I decided to swap some fruitless time on social media for something more enriching, that’s the book I randomly picked up.
And guess what? It could not be more relevant.
So I asked ChatGPT, my intellectual “sparring partner, what it could tell me about the book. Its detailed answer left me in awe, so I’m sharing what I got from it below — with a few of my own comments along the way.
📘 Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) — Umberto Eco🧠
What it’s about (without spoilers)
At its surface, the novel follows three intellectuals working at a publishing house that specializes in esoteric manuscripts — occultism, secret societies, mystical histories, and conspiracy theories.
Out of boredom (and intellectual arrogance), they invent a fake, all-encompassing conspiracy — “The Plan” — connecting:
People start believing it. And then things get… dangerous.
My comment:
Here you can probably see me getting excited — I spotted two things I’m fascinated by: Kabbalah and numerology. Also, a fun fact: whenever my Dad is asked about my newly found profession (to the profound shock of his Armenian circle), his answer is short and sweet: “Occult sciences.” 😂
🧩 Core themes (this is where Eco really plays)
1. The human addiction to meaning
Eco explores how humans:
Sound familiar? Eco was eerily prophetic about the internet age.
2. Conspiracy thinking vs. critical thinking
The book is a brutal critique of:
My comment:
As I always stress to my clients, everything in moderation. All the information I teach and share should be used to our benefit, with critical thinking applied. This is not dogmatic knowledge.
When you start believing everything blindly, you become more prone to spiritual bypassing — blaming planets, numbers, stars, politicians, governments, aliens, and, God knows, whoever else, while refusing to take responsibility for your own actions.
For example, if you have absolutely no way to avoid doing something important on a so-called unfavourable/inauspicious day (the 10th, 20th, or 30th of a month), you should double down on your positive attitude instead of panicking and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of a negative outcome.
3. The danger of intellectual arrogance
The protagonists think they’re safe because:
My comment:
Just like it doesn’t matter whether you jokingly say “I’m going to die alone” or genuinely believe it — thoughts are thoughts, and they have a tendency to materialize.
Think of a very vivid dream you’ve had: you wake up still feeling it was real. I’ve even heard of couples where the wife wouldn’t speak to her husband for days because she dreamed he cheated — the emotional impact was that strong.
And anyone who has experienced a well-conducted past-life regression session can attest that what you think and feel in the session as a so-called past-life personality— physically and emotionally — can be profoundly real.
4. Symbols are powerful — and unstable
As a semiotician, Eco shows how:
⏳ Why the title matters: Foucault’s Pendulum
The real pendulum (in Paris) proves Earth’s rotation — a grounded, physical truth. In the novel, it becomes a symbol of:
The pendulum doesn’t mean anything — it just is.
My comment:
Paris 🙂
The first time I visited the Musée des Arts et Métiers, where Foucault’s Pendulum is located, was this past March. A dear friend and I — who hadn’t seen each other for nearly seven years — had just 1.5 days together, and somehow managed to visit one of her favourite Parisian museums. Of course, it doesn’t have to mean anything — but I still love the serendipity of it.
🪞Why you might find it especially interesting
Knowing your love for:
It asks:
“Just because something can be interpreted doesn’t mean it should be believed.”
How Foucault’s Pendulum Predicts Modern Conspiracy Culture
Eco wrote this before the internet, before social media, before algorithms — and yet he nails the mechanics almost surgically.
🔁 The exact pattern Eco exposes
🧠 Eco’s brutal insight
Conspiracy thinking isn’t about facts. It’s about control over uncertainty. Once someone believes there is a hidden plan, chaos becomes tolerable.
Here are a few key Eco ideas (paraphrased for clarity, staying faithful to meaning):
🔹 On obsession with meaning
“The paranoid is someone who knows a little too much.”
This isn’t ignorance — it’s over-interpretation. Eco warns against the person who can’t stop seeing meaning everywhere.
🔹 On connecting everything
“If you connect everything, the connection itself becomes meaningless.”
This is devastatingly relevant to:
🔹 On secret knowledge
“The desire for a secret is the desire to feel chosen.”
Eco exposes how:
🔹 On belief as performance
“People believe what they want to believe, and then call it truth.”
This is Eco’s quiet accusation against:
My comment:
I was born in the Soviet Union. My parents, uncles, and other relatives — many of them smart people, no strangers to critical thinking — grew up there.
When I recently asked whether they genuinely believed in the ideology or were pretending to believe, their answer surprised me: they truly believed communism was the answer to the world’s problems (just like Germans in Nazi Germany believed everything they had been fed).
Sometimes, believing is also a coping mechanism.
I occasionally get people sharing strong opinions on my Instagram stories — opinions rooted in ideological certainty. They haven’t watched the podcast episode, read the book, or listened to the interview I shared — yet their conviction is unshakeable, grounded in “their truth, and nothing but their truth.”
Mapping the book to today’s wellness & spiritual landscape
Eco would not dismiss spirituality — but he would interrogate it relentlessly.
🌿 Healthy spirituality (Eco-approved)
🚩 Eco’s red flags (then & now)
Eco’s core warning: when meaning replaces responsibility, danger begins.
🪞 Why this matters for your work
You operate at the edge between:
In that sense, Foucault’s Pendulum is almost a guardian text for conscious practitioners: “Don’t fall in love with your own map.”
🧠 Final distilled insight
Eco isn’t anti-meaning. He’s anti-meaning-without-humility.
***
What do you, guys, think? Have you read Foucault’s Pendulum — or had a book appear in your life at exactly the right moment?
I know firsthand that it works exactly like that. Over the last 5–7 years, every time I realized I was ready for the next step in my spiritual growth — and eventually, my new profession — a teacher or mentor I needed at that very moment would somehow magically appear.
I also believe this applies to books, especially when they are written by someone of Umberto Eco’s caliber.
Foucault’s Pendulum has been part of my library for 4 years and 3 months to the date (tell me I’m a nerdy nerd and a numbers person without telling me — yes, I checked the order date: September 13, 2021).
And yesterday, when I decided to swap some fruitless time on social media for something more enriching, that’s the book I randomly picked up.
And guess what? It could not be more relevant.
So I asked ChatGPT, my intellectual “sparring partner, what it could tell me about the book. Its detailed answer left me in awe, so I’m sharing what I got from it below — with a few of my own comments along the way.
📘 Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) — Umberto Eco🧠
What it’s about (without spoilers)
At its surface, the novel follows three intellectuals working at a publishing house that specializes in esoteric manuscripts — occultism, secret societies, mystical histories, and conspiracy theories.
Out of boredom (and intellectual arrogance), they invent a fake, all-encompassing conspiracy — “The Plan” — connecting:
- The Knights Templar
- Rosicrucians
- Freemasons
- Kabbalah
- Hermeticism
- Occult numerology
- Hidden power structures across centuries
People start believing it. And then things get… dangerous.
My comment:
Here you can probably see me getting excited — I spotted two things I’m fascinated by: Kabbalah and numerology. Also, a fun fact: whenever my Dad is asked about my newly found profession (to the profound shock of his Armenian circle), his answer is short and sweet: “Occult sciences.” 😂
🧩 Core themes (this is where Eco really plays)
1. The human addiction to meaning
Eco explores how humans:
- Hate randomness
- Crave patterns
- Prefer a bad explanation to no explanation
Sound familiar? Eco was eerily prophetic about the internet age.
2. Conspiracy thinking vs. critical thinking
The book is a brutal critique of:
- Pseudoscience
- Mystical absolutism
- “Everything is connected” thinking taken too far
My comment:
As I always stress to my clients, everything in moderation. All the information I teach and share should be used to our benefit, with critical thinking applied. This is not dogmatic knowledge.
When you start believing everything blindly, you become more prone to spiritual bypassing — blaming planets, numbers, stars, politicians, governments, aliens, and, God knows, whoever else, while refusing to take responsibility for your own actions.
For example, if you have absolutely no way to avoid doing something important on a so-called unfavourable/inauspicious day (the 10th, 20th, or 30th of a month), you should double down on your positive attitude instead of panicking and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of a negative outcome.
3. The danger of intellectual arrogance
The protagonists think they’re safe because:
- “It’s just a game”
- “We know it’s fiction”
- “We’re too smart to believe this stuff”
My comment:
Just like it doesn’t matter whether you jokingly say “I’m going to die alone” or genuinely believe it — thoughts are thoughts, and they have a tendency to materialize.
Think of a very vivid dream you’ve had: you wake up still feeling it was real. I’ve even heard of couples where the wife wouldn’t speak to her husband for days because she dreamed he cheated — the emotional impact was that strong.
And anyone who has experienced a well-conducted past-life regression session can attest that what you think and feel in the session as a so-called past-life personality— physically and emotionally — can be profoundly real.
4. Symbols are powerful — and unstable
As a semiotician, Eco shows how:
- Symbols don’t have fixed meanings
- Context reshapes truth
- Interpretation can become manipulation
⏳ Why the title matters: Foucault’s Pendulum
The real pendulum (in Paris) proves Earth’s rotation — a grounded, physical truth. In the novel, it becomes a symbol of:
- Objective reality vs. imagined systems
- Science vs. mysticism
- Truth vs. interpretation run wild
The pendulum doesn’t mean anything — it just is.
My comment:
Paris 🙂
The first time I visited the Musée des Arts et Métiers, where Foucault’s Pendulum is located, was this past March. A dear friend and I — who hadn’t seen each other for nearly seven years — had just 1.5 days together, and somehow managed to visit one of her favourite Parisian museums. Of course, it doesn’t have to mean anything — but I still love the serendipity of it.
🪞Why you might find it especially interesting
Knowing your love for:
- consciousness frameworks
- symbolism
- numerology & meaning-making
- psychological depth
- discernment vs. delusion
It asks:
- When does insight become obsession?
- When does intuition override reason?
- When does “pattern recognition” turn into self-deception?
“Just because something can be interpreted doesn’t mean it should be believed.”
How Foucault’s Pendulum Predicts Modern Conspiracy Culture
Eco wrote this before the internet, before social media, before algorithms — and yet he nails the mechanics almost surgically.
🔁 The exact pattern Eco exposes
- Information overload → people feel lost
- Selective pattern-making → “this connects to that”
- Closed systems of belief → every contradiction becomes proof
- Community reinforcement → believers find each other
- Escalation → belief turns into identity, then action
- curiosity
- play
- intellectual exploration
- boredom
- desire to feel initiated
🧠 Eco’s brutal insight
Conspiracy thinking isn’t about facts. It’s about control over uncertainty. Once someone believes there is a hidden plan, chaos becomes tolerable.
Here are a few key Eco ideas (paraphrased for clarity, staying faithful to meaning):
🔹 On obsession with meaning
“The paranoid is someone who knows a little too much.”
This isn’t ignorance — it’s over-interpretation. Eco warns against the person who can’t stop seeing meaning everywhere.
🔹 On connecting everything
“If you connect everything, the connection itself becomes meaningless.”
This is devastatingly relevant to:
- numerology misuse
- spiritual absolutism
- “everything happens for a reason” taken literally
🔹 On secret knowledge
“The desire for a secret is the desire to feel chosen.”
Eco exposes how:
- secret teachings
- hidden codes
- “ancient knowledge they don’t want you to know”
🔹 On belief as performance
“People believe what they want to believe, and then call it truth.”
This is Eco’s quiet accusation against:
- ideological certainty
- spiritual bypassing
- moral superiority disguised as enlightenment
My comment:
I was born in the Soviet Union. My parents, uncles, and other relatives — many of them smart people, no strangers to critical thinking — grew up there.
When I recently asked whether they genuinely believed in the ideology or were pretending to believe, their answer surprised me: they truly believed communism was the answer to the world’s problems (just like Germans in Nazi Germany believed everything they had been fed).
Sometimes, believing is also a coping mechanism.
I occasionally get people sharing strong opinions on my Instagram stories — opinions rooted in ideological certainty. They haven’t watched the podcast episode, read the book, or listened to the interview I shared — yet their conviction is unshakeable, grounded in “their truth, and nothing but their truth.”
Mapping the book to today’s wellness & spiritual landscape
Eco would not dismiss spirituality — but he would interrogate it relentlessly.
🌿 Healthy spirituality (Eco-approved)
- grounded in lived experience
- open to doubt
- symbol-aware (not symbol-enslaved)
- allows multiple meanings
- doesn’t claim absolute truth
🚩 Eco’s red flags (then & now)
Eco’s critique | Modern parallel |
“Hidden masters control everything” | Algorithm/elite/cosmic control narratives |
Numerology as destiny | Numbers replacing agency |
Ancient orders know the truth | “This modality is the ultimate one” |
Interpretation = proof | Intuition used to bypass evidence |
Initiates vs outsiders | Spiritual elitism |
Eco’s core warning: when meaning replaces responsibility, danger begins.
🪞 Why this matters for your work
You operate at the edge between:
- psychology ↔ symbolism
- intuition ↔ structure
- meaning ↔ grounding
- to hold symbols lightly
- to use frameworks as tools, not truths
- to keep the pendulum anchored in reality
In that sense, Foucault’s Pendulum is almost a guardian text for conscious practitioners: “Don’t fall in love with your own map.”
🧠 Final distilled insight
Eco isn’t anti-meaning. He’s anti-meaning-without-humility.
***
What do you, guys, think? Have you read Foucault’s Pendulum — or had a book appear in your life at exactly the right moment?
DECEMBER 2025