Giorgio de Santillana wrote: “When Marcel Griaule, who showed us the unknown civilizations of western Sudan, asked his local experts to tell him something about the inhabited land, to describe what they knew about distant places, he was surprised to see them always pointing to the sky.⁴²⁵ And finally he understood that for them the ‘inhabited land’ meant the area of the Ecliptic.” That wonderful “finally he understood” refers also to Santillana himself: as an agile gentleman of Western culture he had spent decades pursuing the victorious pathways of science, and had seen them culminate between Galileo and Leibniz. And now, gazing at the Creatures of the Zodiac, oblique over the horizon, he realized that pondus, numerus, mensura had previously illuminated and dominated another world, in an entirely different sense, beginning from a Zero Time that he tended to date back to when the equinoctial Sun rose in Gemini, around 5000 B.C.E. He began then to pursue the celestial paths of that other science, fondly collecting fragments from mythographers and from ancient singers. One day he reopened Ernst Cassirer’s book on “symbolic forms,” the great scholar’s most detailed work, which had long been a guide for him. He realized that almost nothing in those pages remained valid. Something similar happened to Frances Yates: she had begun studying Giordano Bruno shortly before World War II, particularly because he belonged to the Italian Renaissance—two words that thrilled her, as they did many other young English devotees of culture. She had originally planned to translate La cena de le ceneri “with an introduction emphasizing the boldness with which this advanced philosopher of the Renaissance accepted the Copernican theory.”⁴²⁶ But there was something in that valiant knight of Modernity that she found unconvincing: “was the Copernican theory really the subject of the debate or was there something else implied in it?” She spent much time studying Bruno’s mnemotechnical writings without being able to say what they were about.⁴²⁷ When she finally grasped the clavis, she immediately saw the Beasts of the Zodiac emerge and conceal themselves on the wheels of memory. The oblique band of the Ecliptic once again revealed the stories that the Dogons read there: “Wanting to explore their geographic horizon, [Griaule] tried to discuss the inhabited lands, what these tribesmen knew about the world around them.⁴²⁸ But soon he saw them once again pointing up, and showing him boundaries in the sky. And he realized that for them the idea of ‘inhabited lands’ referred to the area of stars between the two Tropics: a 47-degree band in the sky, lying on both sides of the Equator. Those are the true and only ‘inhabitants.’ ”

Going back in history, we realize that guilt and evil recede more and more from the bad intentions of a single man and assume the august reality of numbers. Original sin becomes a mathematical and divine fact, an occurrence in coelestibus, like all occurrences that are worthy of discussion. Measured in time, there are three forms of the evil, of the guilt, of the irresolvable disorder that accompanies us. And here is the probable sequence in which they were discovered: