Dan Brown
Il Codice Da Vinci

Dear Grimorio,

today has been a day full of esoteric excitement. Even during breakfast, not fully awake yet, I managed to spot twenty-seven cornflakes in the shape of pentacles and a couple of genitalia. Undoubtedly a satisfying start. On the series of buses I took, my keen eye could distinguish at least thirty-five different cabalistic combinations, all highly symbolic and concerning the sure persistence of a solid core of hidden Templars among us (though the last one, no, the last one was a fucking senseless number).

The morning was pleasant. Up to a certain point, I confined myself to recording the unusual arrangement of tiles in a square, attempting to decipher its occult message. There I was, racking my brain, thinking, thinking, occasionally flipping through the puzzle page of Mickey Mouse for inspiration. Then, suddenly, enlightenment. With the simultaneous positioning, with the sun precisely at its zenith, of about thirty pigeons on the churchyard - undoubtedly driven by obscure biological laws and instinctual mechanisms that the Sage who left the message had foreseen in the tiniest detail - in what was clearly the shape of a giant genital intertwined with the symbol of the Last Rosicrucians of Scotland and that of the Sinclair house, it became absolutely clear to me, almost trivially so - what a fucking idiot I am - that it was all there, all under the sunlight, written in Masonic-postmeridional-pretombal code with pleasant dialectal inflections almost Hittite. Damn, it was all so clear, so clear. With a notepad in hand, I transcribed and deciphered. The problem is that these dead codes are rather, well, ambiguous. And the more dead they are, the more ambiguous they are. And this one was truly very dead, you understand. So, after discarding about fifty possible translations, the list of acceptable solutions was reduced to:

1) Stat Rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
2) Connect the dots from 1 to 16; a nice scene will appear.
3) Jesus & Madda 3msc.
4) Eh? (I have some qualms about the actual probability of this last one, if only for quantitative correspondence, but in that language many concepts are expressed with various periphrases.)

For the moment I let it go; I'll return to it with a cool head.

Perhaps you don't know, dear Grimorio, that for a few days now I've been seeing a girl. Her name is Eva Miriam Saunière Di Buglione, a name ripe with exciting symbolism and dark connections, and she is simply a gorgeous girl. We met in a small outdoor bar right under the Vatican (Da Mario Er Mejo Zozzone, run by a quirky, mustached fellow who surprised us to know is also a virtuoso of the mandolin). She was attracted by my style and my ever-green tweed jacket, was fascinated by how I passionately and with indisputable competence described to her some thirteenth-century bas-reliefs by Bernini, and was definitively seduced by my fiery declaration (I can't recall the exact words now, but I spun some kind of very romantic metaphor, an unbelievable piece of poetry, which boldly compared her to a vase full of divine blood and sperm; if you had seen how she reacted, dear Grimorio!). A couple of glasses of Tuscan wine loosened us up, and tipsy and drunk in love as I was, I left the waiter a hefty tip, something like 20 dollars. I think he then shouted at me, but I didn't understand why.
Anyway, I and the splendid Eva Miriam ended up in a charming little hotel room nearby and enjoyed many minutes of mutual pleasure, giving a big fuck-off to the inhibitions of a repressive upbringing, the Inquisition (which, as I understand, they still have around here), and the general Nazi-Catholic conspiracy. In short, we had a blast, at least until, in the midst of foreplay, she took off her panties and I couldn't help but fall into adoration in front of the Sacred Feminine. The subsequent reverent fear aroused in me a psychological block of dramatic proportions that prevented me from enjoying the moment, despite her being very sweet, comforting, and reassuring (I suspect hypocritically).

Perhaps she is not the right girl for me, or perhaps it’s another millenary conspiracy.

This evening, alone in my hotel room, flipping through channels, I came across a program that seemed very interesting, hosted by someone who goes by a name like Giacobbe, I don't know, but it seems significant, especially from an apocryphal and gnostic standpoint. From what I was able to understand, it confirmed all my deepest convictions about the incontestable fact that the Templars are among us, live among us, plot among us, sometimes stealing jobs from our kids but always and still for a higher cause. And they leave genitalia everywhere, which is certainly not a bad thing.

Soon I'll go out. I'm going to spit at priests on the street. I hope not to run into a rabid black cat, like last time, or a madman equipped with an Opus Dei cilice. They’re particularly prone to violence, those ones.