Vincent Bridges

AN EXCERPT FROM:
A MONUMENT TO THE END OF TIME: ALCHEMY, FULCANELLI, AND THE GREAT CROSS
by Jay Weidner AND Vincent Bridges
©1999 Aethyrea Books

Chapter One: The Fulcanelli Mystery

4. “A Lodestone of Pure Weirdness”

The Hendaye Cross is the loose thread on the tapestry of history. Tug on it long enough and the whole carefully constructed psycho-drama unravels before your eyes. It is the grand maguffin of the mystery.

Although Hendaye has grown into a good-sized resort town, the town square and St. Vincent’s church looks much the same as it did in the 1920s and 30s when Fulcanelli and M. Lemoine the painter came to visit. Wednesday is still market day, and the vendors of fresh fish and vegetables still line the square. The people who pass by on their way to the square barely notice the non-descript cross standing against the wall of the church. Cars park a few feet away, and the everyday bustle of life in a French resort town takes place around it. Occasionally, like M. Lemoine, a tourist stops to take a photograph.

It is of course the curious images on the pedestal that attracts attention. The casual passer-by sees an angry sunface and a strange cross with four A’s. These faces of the pedestal are easily visible, but walking around the monument reveals two more, a man-in-the-moon design and, close against the church wall, an eight-rayed star-burst. The ordinary tourist snaps his shot, then looks for a sign explaining what he has just taken a snap of. Finding no information except more curious images, our tourist shrugs and later labels that side as “Cross with angry sun face, Hendaye.”

Hendaye CrossHowever, standing before the Cross, in the bright Basque sunlight on a busy Wednesday market morning, we came face to face with the great mystery. Somehow, Fulcanelli inserted a new chapter in Le Mystere designed to link, uniquely in all alchemical literature, Chilaism and the secret of practical alchemy and thereby point directly to the real secret, the nature of time itself. As proof, he offers the reality of the Cyclic Cross of Hendaye and its symbolic code.

Like a lodestone of pure weirdness, this juxtaposition of the end of the world with the transmutational process of alchemy drew us out of our normal routines and eventually all the way to southwestern France and the Cross itself. Our involvement began accidentally when one author, Jay Weidner, picked up a copy of Le Mystere at a yard sale in West Hollywood. Over a decade later, the code was cracked, and, as the implications emerged, the mystery began to consume our lives. We found ourselves without any recourse but to go to France and resolve it. If the Cross existed, we felt, then we could validate much of what Fulcanelli had to say in Le Mystere. Without the monument, however, the whole thing vanished into a cloud of hoaxed smoke.

Yet, as we decided after our last visit, other than proving the existence of the Cross, going to Hendaye and researching its history left us with few clues. As we discovered, Hendaye surfaced into the spotlight of history at a few key moments - Hitler visited in October 1940 to meet with General Franco of Spain - to tantalize us with its possible significance. Only to fade back into obscurity with hardly a ripple of historic remembrance. The Cross itself seemed to have no history, and other than Fulcanelli and Boucher, it is unremarked upon.

But it does exist. And the symbols on it are just as Fulcanelli described. Could the Cross at Hendaye really be a monument to the double catastrophe which will “try the northern hemisphere with fire” as Fulcanelli insists?

That blustery spring morning standing in front of the Cross, we decided that the reality of the cross brought into focus the questions that must be answered in order to evaluate its message. We can list them in five broad categories:

1) Is Fulcanelli telling the truth? Is there any connection, in history or tradition, between alchemy and such gnostic eschatologies as Chilaism? And if there is a connection, how has it been maintained through the centuries? Is the secret really displayed on the walls of certain Gothic Cathedrals?

2) What does Fulcanelli have to say about alchemy and the Cross at Hendaye? And does that information shed any light on the connection between alchemy and eschatology?

3) What do the symbolic images and ciphers on the Cross mean? How are they “the rarest symbolic translation” of an apocalyptic philosophy? And, most important of all, do they suggest a date?

4) Is there any scientific evidence to support the idea of Fulcanelli’s double catastrophe? And does that evidence also suggest any insight into alchemy?

5) And if this catastrophe is cyclical, what happened the last time? Can we find any proof?

Standing in front of the Cross at Hendaye that day, we realized the importance of having answers to these questions. We needed information, solid facts, to resolve the mystery. We never suspected that once we had laid bare the meaning of Fulcanelli and the Cross, the real work would begin.

As we found answers, both expected and unexpected, to our list of questions, we also found that our subject was expanding, also in ways both expected and unexpected. We agreed that we would focus first on the meaning of the Hendaye chapter and the monument itself. The history of alchemy would have to be included, we thought, but only to support Hendaye’s message. We had no intention of attempting to unravel the ultimate mystery of alchemy itself, much less an exhaustive examination of the contents of Le Mystere and Dwellings. We simply wanted to know if the things “Fulcanelli” reported in the Hendaye chapter were true.

Now, after years of intensive research, we can definitely state that not only is the information in “The Cyclic Cross of Hendaye” true, but that it demonstrates a sophisticated knowledge of galactic mechanics, something that Fulcanelli would have been hard pressed to come by in the 1920’s, much less the designer of the Cross itself, working back in 1680. The implications of this are staggering.

©1999 Aethyrea Books

This section of Chapter One of “A MONUMENT TO THE END OF TIME: ALCHEMY, FULCANELLI, AND THE GREAT CROSS” by Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges is presented here as a courtesy from Aethyrea Books.

AN EXCERPT FROM:
A MONUMENT TO THE END OF TIME: ALCHEMY, FULCANELLI, AND THE GREAT CROSS
by Jay Weidner AND Vincent Bridges
©1999 Aethyrea Books

Chapter One: The Fulcanelli Mystery

3. Alchemical Legends and the Reality of the Cross

However we approach the subject of Alchemy, we are rewarded with a mystery, until the entire subject becomes an infinite regression of mirrored mysteries. And so, if we are not careful, we end up finding only the face of our own bias. The secret protects itself, even when it is displayed in plain sight.

Fulcanelli serves as an example. The occult savants of Paris wanted to believe in the possibility of physical transmutation, therefore the suggestion that someone had actually done it grew into an obsession. A modern day Flamel, they thought, a renegade physical chemist who, like the Curies, had stumbled on a way to manipulate the radioactive “light” locked within matter. No matter that not a trace of such speculation could be found in Le Mystere; all alchemist wrote in code anyway. So the mystery focused on who was Fulcanelli? If his identity could be discovered, then the transmutation could be verified. Unfortunately, no one ever claimed the title and presented his proof.

But the idea persisted. There had been a “real” alchemist in the 20th century. There is even a touch of the surreal to the image: a tall aristocratic elder guiding a group of young acolytes through the transmutational process in a municipal gasworks laboratory. Canseliet of course is our source for these images, leaked through the years as a way, perhaps, to carefully perpetuate the myth.

In the same fashion, the idea that “Fulcanelli” was a committee has also handicapped our understanding of what the work itself has to say. The example of the Hendaye chapter is significant here. Because it can’t be made to fit neatly into the pattern of the “hoax” or committee hypothesis, it is simply ignored.

The circumstantial evidence suggests that there really was a person behind the Fulcanelli mask, whose intermittent visits seemed to produce change and upheaval in Canseliet’s life. Each appearance marked a major turning point, from his first encounter to his last. Fulcanelli would also seem to be virtually immortal, appearing to be roughly half his probable age the last time Canseliet saw him. As for the gender-bending androgyny of the completed Great Work, well, the jury is still out on that one. It could have been Fulcanelli’s daughter or grand-daughter. It could have a dream or an initiation, or even some fantasy of Canseliet’s long held love for his Master. But, the unavoidable fact remains, some sort of meeting occurred in the early 1950s and the Hendaye chapter’s inclusion in the second edition of Le Mystere was the result of that encounter.

The appearance of the second edition of Dwellings in 1959 marked another watershed. The catastrophe theme was openly discussed in Canseliet’s preface to that edition. Within the year, the legend would gain another twist with the publication of the first newage bestseller, The Morning Of The Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier. The Fulcanelli phenomenon began to exhibit new life, growing in unexpected directions.

Magicians cemented the image of Fulcanelli as the archetypal 20th century alchemist, warning of the dangers of atomic energy like the best contemporary “space brothers” and ascended masters. In 1960, this was undoubtedly the view of the occult establishment, whose perspectives Pauwels and Bergier were exploring. The mish-mash of ideas thrown together in Magicians does manage to ask some of the right questions. In the course of this investigation, we would find ourselves returning again and again to the synchronicities of Morning of the Magicians.

It served however to introduce the story of Fulcanelli to an English speaking audience. A decade or so later, this interest would bear fruit in the excellent translation by Mary Sworder of Le Mystere’s second edition. Soon after the translation was published, the only full scale work on alchemy and Fulcanelli in English appeared. The Fulcanelli Phenomenon by Kenneth Raynor Johnson, published in England in 1980, raised more questions than it answered.

Phenomenon is in many ways an excellent book on the history and practice of alchemy. Its information on Fulcanelli and Canseliet is solid and well presented. In some cases, it is our only source for large pieces of the puzzle. However, the careful reader is left with an after- taste of special pleading. Johnson, ultimately, is obscuring as much as he is revealing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the epilogue, an examination of the Hendaye Cross written by someone named Paul Mevryl.

In a way, we should be grateful that anyone had the courage to comment on Hendaye in print. Up to this point, it was conspicuous by its absence from the literature. Mevryl tackles it head-on in a wild explosion of science fiction and creative cryptography. The skeptical reader may be forgiven for throwing up his hands in disgust and declaring the whole thing a hoax or an hallucination. And, perhaps, that is exactly what the article was intended to accomplish.

Fulcanelli, and alchemy in general, is a subject that inspires obscurantist literature. Most books on alchemy, particularly those written by adepts, are designed to confuse the unwary or naive reader. Only those that possess the key to the language can read their real message. But the books written about Fulcanelli, starting with Morning of the Magicians fall into a new category of obscurantism. They seem specifically designed to obscure Fulcanelli, as if he had somehow given too much away.

The next major work to mention Fulcanelli in any depth certainly is obscure. Refuge of the Apocalypse, by Elizabeth Van Buren, begins with a description of Hendaye and Fulcanelli’s comments on it. She quotes Fulcanelli’s warning to Canseliet, then jumps to a statement that Fulcanelli told others that the place of refuge was Rennes, in the Aude of southern France. From this slender reed, Van Buren builds a complex thesis that involves the bloodline of Jesus, tunnel openings and landscape zodiacs all pointing to Rennes-le-Chateau as Fulcanelli’s “single place of refuge.”

This digression into the world of Holy Blood/Holy Grail, by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh, was strange enough. The next book to dwell on Fulcanelli was even more bizarre. Al-Kemi: A Memoir - Hermetic, Occult, Political and Private Aspects of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, by Andre VandenBroeck, revealed that the esoteric Egyptologist had close connections with the Fulcanelli group. At this point, all a researcher can do is to echo poor Alice: “curiouser and curiouser.”

And, like Alice, somewhere along the line we stepped through the looking glass.

From the mouth of the Nive at Bayonne to the straits of Bidassoa, the southwest coast of France is known as the Cote D’Argent, to contrast it with the Cote D’Azur of the French Riviera on the Mediterranean. While never as famous as the Riviera, the Cote D’Argent has always been something of a royal playground. The Sun King, Louis XIV, spent his honeymoon on the beach at St. Jean-de-Luz while Biarritz, just a little farther up the coast, was the Victorian royal resort par excellence. Everyone, from the Empress Eugenie and Napoleon III to Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the Prince of Wales, seemed to show up for the season.

Hendaye is on the coast between the French and Spanish borders.

H. G. Wells made the small tuna fishing town of St Jean-de-Luz famous as an intellectual resort. It’s not hard to imagine the impeccable Wells and his walrus mustache ensconced on the long white beach, tuna nets strung from poles to dry in the sun while the boats trawl in the far distance, dictating the History of Mankind to a small army of assistants. Wells, Aldous Huxley and the smart young London set discovered St. Jean-de-Luz in 1920 and by 1926 or so the luxury villas had spread as far down as Hendaye.

Located at the point where the Pyrenees meet the Gulf of Gascogne, Hendaye has always been a frontier town. Much later, when one side of the mountains had become French and the other Spanish, a young Sun King, Louis XIV at the height of his good looks and power, met his bride, Princess Marie-Therese of Spain, on an island in the bay below Hendaye, gracefully escorting her along the boundary between their two countries. They were married at the small church in St. Jean-de-Luz, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, and, in that glorious summer of 1660, it must have seemed as if a new European dynasty of almost Pharaonic brilliance was in the making.

A few years later - around 1680, give or take a decade -someone built an enigmatic mortuary monument in the parish cemetery of St. Vincent’s church at Hendaye. The date of its construction, who or what it was meant to memorialize, even its original location have all been lost. All that is known about the Cyclic Cross, as Fulcanelli labeled it, is that it was moved from the cemetery to the southwest corner of the churchyard in 1842 when the church underwent a restoration. There it remains today, a battered and fading monument to the end of time.

It sits in a very small courtyard just to the south of the church. There is a small garden with a park bench nearby. Standing about 12 feet tall, The Cyclic Cross at Hendaye looms over the courtyard, an ambiguous apparition in the clear Basque sunlight. The monument is brown and discolored from its 300 plus years. The facade is starting to crumble and it’s obvious that the air pollution ¬?¬© the Cross sits a few yards from a busy street on the main square ¬?¬© is speeding its dissolution. The Cross will be completely eroded in a few more years. The images and the Latin inscription on the Cross have no more than a generation left before pollution wipes the images clean and the message disappears forever.

The base of local sandstone sits on a broad but irregular three step platform, and is roughly cubic. Close examination reveals that it is a little taller than it is wide. On each face are curious symbols, a sunface glaring like some ancient American sungod, a strange shield-like arrangement of A’s in the arms of a cross, an eight-sided starburst, and most curious of all, an old-fashioned man-in-the-moon face.

Rising from this is a fluted column, with a suggestion of Greek classicism, on top of which stands a very rudely done Greek cross with Latin inscriptions. Above the sunface on the western side can be seen a double X figure on the top portion of the cross. Below that, on the transverse arm, is the common inscription “Hail, O Cross, The Only Hope.” On the reverse side of the upper cross, above the starburst, is the Christian symbol INRI.

The top of the Hendaye Cross showing sun and moon.

Fulcanelli tells us that “whatever its age, the Hendaye cross shows by the decoration of its pedestal that it is the strangest monument of primitive millenarism, the rarest symbolic translation of Chilaism, which I have ever met.” Coming from Canseliet’s Master, this is striking enough to command attention.

But what he does mean by “primitive millenarism?” And how are the decorations on the pedestal “the rarest symbolic translation of Chilaism?” What, exactly, is Chilaism?

Fulcanelli provides some guidance by referring to the Fathers of the Church, Origen, St. Denis of Alexandria and St. Jerome, who first accepted and then refuted the chilaist doctrine. Then he tells us that Chilaism “was part of the esoteric tradition of the ancient hermetic philosophy.”

Chilaism was a second century CE Gnostic belief in a literal renewal of the earth after its destruction on the Day of Judgment. This transformed world would be free of sin, a virtual paradise of sensual delights, feasts and weddings, the gnostic chilaists preached. Naturally the more orthodox branches of the church found this threatening, although, as Fulcanelli points out, it was never officially condemned. It was refuted, by Origen - a 2nd century CE Church patriarch who is now our main source of information on the chilaists - and slowly faded into the heretical underground.

“Primitive millenarism” is an even more curious phrase. The use of the word “primitive” in this context suggests “prime” or “primeval,” definitely pre-Christian, or even pre-historic. The monument then is not only an example of heretical Christian belief, but also somehow describes a primitive, or ancient, view of the end of the world. Fulcanelli makes the point even more pointed when he comments “that the unknown workman, who made these images, possessed real and profound knowledge of the universe.”

So, we are presented with a strange monument, which describes both a heretical Christian view of the apocalypse, and a very ancient primitive view of the same apparently cosmological event. And most amazing of all, Fulcanelli is implying that this concept is a part of the “esoteric tradition of the ancient hermetic philosophy” known as alchemy. In the entire literature of alchemy and its history, no one else has ever openly connected it with eschatology. On first glance, it seems ridiculous. How can the end of the world, the apocalypse and so on, be connected in any way with turning lead into gold?

As we dug deeper, we discovered that Fulcanelli had left us a clue, a major clue, to the big secret at the core of alchemy. We would find that alchemy had always been associated with the idea of time and timing, and that, as Fulcanelli informed us, Chilaism lay at the center of the idea of transforming time itself. We would even discover the simple and literal truth of Fulcanelli’s statement that the unknown designer of the Cross had real and true knowledge of the universe. From that knowledge, displayed by the Hendaye Cross, we would eventually unravel a whole new perspective on alchemy, one that touched on the deepest mysteries of magic, mysticism and religion. And one that posed the question of extinction or enlightenment for the entire planet.

©1999 Aethyrea Books

This section of Chapter One of “A MONUMENT TO THE END OF TIME: ALCHEMY, FULCANELLI, AND THE GREAT CROSS” by Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges is presented here as a courtesy from Aethyrea Books.

AN EXCERPT FROM:
A MONUMENT TO THE END OF TIME: ALCHEMY, FULCANELLI, AND THE GREAT CROSS
by Jay Weidner AND Vincent Bridges
©1999 Aethyrea Books

Chapter One: The Fulcanelli Mystery

2. A Mysterious Alchemist Adds a Chapter

The Fulcanelli affair would be of interest only to specialists of occult history and abnormal psychology, except for the singular mystery of the extra chapter. The second edition of Le Mystere, published in 1957, had a new chapter entitled “The Cyclic Cross of Hendaye” and a few changes in its illustrations. No mention of these changes appeared in Canseliet’s preface to the edition.

A few detractors, as early as the publication of Dwellings, had been suspicious that the whole affair was the work of a group of occult pranksters centered on the bookstore of Pierre Dujols in the Luxemborg District of Paris. The critics have archly suggested it was an obscure literary hoax, perhaps designed to give the Brotherhood of Heliopolis, as the group liked to call itself, the cachet of a real tradition. It must be admitted, that if that were indeed the case, they failed miserably.

Pierre Dujols de Valois

Any motivation for a hoax seems to be lacking. None of the Brotherhood, such as it was, benefited from or capitalized on the supposed Fulcanelli’s teaching, except Eugene Canseliet and possibly Jean-Julien Champagne, the artist who illustrated both volumes. The group, The Brotherhood of Heliopolis, seems to have remained small and closed, limited to Champagne and his friends, and faded away after his death in 1932.

However, the publisher, Jean Schemit, assumed that “Fulcanelli” and Champagne were the same, and since he was the only objective observer on the scene, his opinion carries some weight. Certainly, if Champagne were not Fulcanelli, he was in fact his agent. Canseliet’s role seemed, to M. Schemit, more of an amanuensis or secretary. Fulcanelli Devoile, by Genevieve Dubois, a recent French examination of the Fulcanelli legend, even concludes that the work was a product of a committee with Pierre Dujols (who died in 1926, the year Le Mystere was published) supplying the scholarship, Champagne the operational skills and Canseliet in charge of assembling the notes.

But even if we agree, for the sake of argument, that Champagne and his friends are our best candidate for Fulcanelli’s secret identity, the question remains: who wrote the extra chapter in the second edition of Le Mystere? Champagne was a quarter of a century dead when the second edition appeared. It is unlikely that he was the author, even though internal evidence suggests that it was written at least a decade before his death.

With Canseliet’s use of everything else by Fulcanelli ¬?¬© or Champagne and Dujols, the “Fulcanelli” group - how are we to account for the complete absence of reference to Hendaye in Canseliet’s works prior to the mid 1950s? If the chapter is the work of Champagne, then Canseliet must have known about it. This is not a trivial question. The Hendaye chapter is perhaps the single most astounding esoteric work in western history. It offers proof that alchemy is somehow connected to eschatology, that is the timing of the end of the world. And it offers the conclusion that a “double catastrophe” is imminent. If Canseliet had known of this, he would surely have used it, or at least mentioned it. Yet, the silence is complete and compelling.

So where did it come from? We do have one intriguing clue that serves to compound the mystery. In 1936, Jules Boucher, by Canseliet’s recollection a peripheral member of the group but by his own account an integral part, published a two page spread in the obscure occult revue Consolation on “The Cross of Hendaye.” Apparently an artist, the painter Lemoine, took some photos of the Cross while vacationing near Hendaye and showed them to his friend, the editor of Consolation, Maryse Choisy. From there, Jules Boucher, a young occult writer, was commissioned to write an “esoteric” article on the Cross.

Jules Boucher’s esoteric article, “La Croix d’Hen-daye,” 1936.

Boucher’s article is significant more for the differences between his version and that attributed to Fulcanelli, than it is for any similarities. Boucher clearly understood enough of the symbology on the monument to unravel its secret, but he gave no hint of any deeper understanding of the Cross. Fulcanelli, however is direct and clear. He knows specifics and gives clues that can only have come from direct knowledge. There is nothing to suggest that Canseliet copied Boucher’s article and fabricated the new Hendaye chapter from it. But there is evidence that Boucher had been exposed, somehow, to the information in that chapter.

The clue lies in Boucher’s use of Fulcanelli’s translation of the oddly spaced inscription on the front of the Cross. Normally arranged, it is the simple “O Cross, Our Only Hope” of thousands of cemetery monuments. But, the s of the Latin Spes or hope is displaced, cut off on the first line so that the inscription reads O Crux Aves Pes Unica. Boucher uses what he perceives to be an extra oddity in spacing to suggest that it should be read phonetically in French as O Croix Have Espace Unique, or “O cross, the single pale space.”

The inscription on the cross.

This is how Fulcanelli phrased it in the new chapter: “It is written that Life takes refuge in a single space.” From this, we can see that Boucher has heard or read Fulcanelli’s version and then gone looking for its origin in the Latin phrase. But his derivation is flawed, and yields only a close approximation of the phrase. As we will find later, Fulcanelli meant just what he said about how to read this symbolic inscription. It becomes clear that Boucher was consulting a source that seems to be at least partially the text of the new Hendaye chapter.

There is no evidence that Canseliet knew anything about Boucher’s article. It was only rediscovered by researchers long after the second edition of Le Mystere was published, and remains the only contemporary publication on Hendaye’s Cross. Therefore, Boucher’s independent approach to the Cross suggests that Fulcanelli was still in contact with some of his students, just not with Canseliet. So, if Canseliet didn’t copy Boucher, and the rest of the group “Fulcanelli” was dead when it was written, where did Canseliet get the new chapter?

The only solution is that Canseliet met the real Fulcanelli again, and got it straight from the source. Canseliet claims that just such a meeting actually took place, in the Pyrenees in the early 1950s. While Hendaye is never mentioned in Canseliet’s account, the story itself is quite spectacular in its strangeness.

To place the tale of Canseliet’s last encounter with Fulcanelli in any sort of context, we must cut through the tangled accounts of Canseliet’s relationship with “The Master” and establish a reasonable, common denominator chronology. Born in late 1899, Eugene Canseliet claimed to have met Fulcanelli shortly after the start of the Great War, while still an adolescent. The next year, he claimed to have met Champagne as another of Fulcanelli’s students. Later in life, Canseliet declared that he had spent 15 years with Fulcanelli, implying, since they seem to have met in 1915, that he last saw the Master in 1930.

However, from the mid 1920s until Champagne’s death in 1932, Canseliet lived across the hall from Champagne in a cold-water walk-up of the Butte-Montmartre district. Therefore Canseliet was the one person most likely to know if Champagne really was Fulcanelli. And to the end, Canseliet denied that Champagne was anything more than the illustrator.

Even though Canseliet had the most to gain by perpetuating the myth of Fulcanelli, it is obvious that there is something more than just self-serving egoism at work in his descriptions of Fulcanelli. If Fulcanelli had really been either Dujols or Champagne, then why would Canseliet continue the hoax long after they were dead? Why change Le Mystere at all? Why not admit the whole thing and claim the credit? And yet, Canseliet went to his grave declaring that Fulcanelli was a real person, and was certainly not Champagne or Dujols. When our main witness insists on the truth of such a central fact, then it behooves us to listen. As we have seen, there is at least some independent evidence of Fulcanelli’s existence.

Therefore, let us take Eugene Canseliet at his word and see if we can find the truth of his relationship with Fulcanelli.

Canseliet claimed to have met the group around Fulcanelli just before the war, and seems to have worked directly with them through the war years. Sometime after 1919, Fulcanelli seems to have faded from the scene as a direct presence. At least that is the assumption based on the admittedly conflicting evidence of Canseliet’s changing versions of the story. But the contact with Fulcanelli, who ever he was, left the Brotherhood of Heliopolis - Canseliet, Champagne, and the rest - in possession of several secrets.

Including the secret of physical transmutation according to some of Canseliet’s later accounts. In the mid 1970s, just a few years before his death, he told the American occultist Walter Lang that he and Champagne and another Brother, Gaston Sauvage, performed a transmutation in 1922, in the municipal gasworks laboratory of Sarcelles, with a minute amount of the powder of projection given to him by Fulcanelli. In a conversation with Albert Riedel (Frater Albertus of the Paracelsus Research Society), Canseliet claimed that he performed the transmutation under Fulcanelli’s direction. To some, this suggests that Fulcanelli was literally there in the room, demonstrating the correct transmutative technique. Actually, Canseliet is saying no more than that he was following Fulcanelli’s directions, which could have been written down years before.

Frater Albertus however, had information from independent sources that Fulcanelli himself had performed a transmutation in Bourges in 1937 in the presence of Ferdinand Lesseps II and Pierre Curie. This would suggest that Boucher was right, and Fulcanelli was still on the scene in the late 1930s. Unfortunately, Albertus does not supply us with the source of his information. Canseliet claimed to know nothing of the incident. It might be easy to dismiss it as one more occult fabrication, except for the mention of Lesseps and Curie. Canseliet confirmed that they were among Fulcanelli’s large circle of friends.

It is perhaps this early connection with scientists such as Curie that led the OSS and other Allied intelligence agencies to search for Fulcanelli immediately after the war. Canseliet confirms this in his conversation with Frater Albertus, and implies that they are still seeking him. So apparently, Fulcanelli, on some level or other, seems have a been a real presence right through the end of the war in 1945.

For a man who died or disappeared before 1926, if we are to take Canseliet’s first preface to Le Mystere at face value, that’s a pretty active record. However, by sifting through Canseliet’s statements, we can determine a sort of minimalist time line. From 1915 to around 1919, Canseliet was in direct contact with Fulcanelli. He visited Canseliet, perhaps to deliver the powder of projection and a stack of manuscripts, at Sarcelles in 1922. Then, Canseliet tells us in his various accounts he saw him again in 1930, and once more, miraculously, in 1952.

In many ways, this simplified chronology makes the most sense. Fulcanelli was never seen visiting Champagne or Canseliet, because he wasn’t in contact with them during the period that they lived next door to each other. He visited Canseliet at Sarcelles and we are never told where the 1930 meeting took place. This literal absence of Fulcanelli explains many of the minor mysteries, such as the liberties Canseliet and Champagne took with the project. Perhaps Canseliet truly meant what he said in the preface to the first edition of Le Mystere and never expected to see Fulcanelli again?

What a shock then when he returned in 1930, after both books had been published. Perhaps Fulcanelli wasn’t pleased by what Canseliet and Champagne had done with his work. This might explain Champagne’s sudden decline into apathy and alcoholism, which led to his death two years later. Certainly, Fulcanelli broke off contact with Canseliet, leaving him to his own devices. However, some sort of signal was arranged, in case Fulcanelli ever wanted to get back in touch with Canseliet. We know this because something of the sort actually happened.

In 1952, after a wait of almost 22 years, Canseliet met his Master one last time. Before his death, Canseliet told the story, in several versions, to a number of friends and researchers. When he received the signal, Canseliet went to a specific city, perhaps Seville in Spain, where he was met by a car which drove him deep into the Pyrenees. Arriving at a large chateau, Canseliet was greeted by his old Master, Fulcanelli, now looking the same age as Canseliet himself - then in his early fifties - even though he had been around eighty in 1930.

From here on, Canseliet’s story becomes vague and dream-like as shock piled upon shock. Like Parzival’s first visit to the Grail castle, wonders pass in front of Canseliet without his ever asking the question: why?. And, like Parzival, Canseliet ends up on the outside, the castle having vanished, wondering just what it was all about.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, author of Parsival is shown second from the left in this rare 14th-century manuscript. Wolfram described the Holy Grail in terms of a stone.

He was given a room in an upper turret and a “petit laboratoire” in which to conduct his experiments. He was so impressed by the small laboratory, that he began to wonder what the Grand Laboratory might be like in comparison. Gradually, as he met the other visitors, it began to dawn on Canseliet that his Master’s Chateau was a refuge for advanced alchemical adepts. That evening, he saw a group of small children, dressed in 16th century clothes, playing in the courtyard below his window. Canseliet, like Parzival, didn’t think to ask any questions. He went to bed and forgot about it.

Days passed, with Canseliet happily puttering around in his laboratory. Fulcanelli stopped by occasionally to see how he was doing, but Canseliet is vague on their discussions. Then one morning, Canseliet awakened early and went downstairs into the courtyard for a breath of air without doing more than throwing on his clothes. As he stood there with his shirt unbuttoned and his braces hanging loose from trousers, three women entered the courtyard, chattering in happy feminine voices.

Embarrassed, Canseliet froze, hoping that they wouldn’t notice him standing in the doorway. As they passed, one of the three turned and looked directly at Canseliet and smiled. Shocked to his core, Canseliet recognized the face of the young woman as that of his Master, Fulcanelli.

Canseliet would talk and write about his visit to the castle of the adepts many times before his death, but he saved this gem of pure strangeness for his closest friends. It only appeared in print after his death, in K. R. Johnson’s Fulcanelli Phenomenon, a book about which we will have much to say later on. The end of the story is very confused, but Canseliet eventually left the castle. Fulcanelli however gave him a word of warning before he left, reported by Canseliet in the 1964 edition of his Alchimie: “The time will come, my son, when you will no longer be able to work in alchemy, when it will become necessary for you to search for the rare and blessed land along the frontiers to the south.”

And this is as close as we get to the possible origin of the Hendaye chapter, the oblique mention of a disaster and a place of refuge. But for the reality of that additional chapter it might be possible to dismiss this story as an old man’s fabrication. Whatever really happened, the evidence forces us to accept that Canseliet met someone who delivered that apocalyptic chapter and ordered its publication in the new edition of Le Mystere. Applying Occam’s razor suggests that Fulcanelli is the most likely source. After that encounter, however, Fulcanelli seems to have truly vanished. Canseliet never saw him again, and neither has anyone else with any degree of certainty.

©1999 Aethyrea Books

This section of Chapter One of “A MONUMENT TO THE END OF TIME: ALCHEMY, FULCANELLI, AND THE GREAT CROSS” by Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges is presented here as a courtesy from Aethyrea Books.

AN EXCERPT FROM:

A MONUMENT TO THE END OF TIME: ALCHEMY, FULCANELLI, AND THE GREAT CROSS
by Jay Weidner AND Vincent Bridges ©1999 Aethyrea Books

PART 1: The Fulcanelli MysteryWelcome to the world’s greatest mystery.

It has everything: clues and ciphers, red herrings and consciously enigmatic jokes. There are villains, victims and heroes littering the plot line, along with unreadable books, inscrutable monuments and strange unearthly figures who flit along through the ages as if they had a purchase agreement on eternity.

At the heart of the great mystery story interwoven through the whole tapestry of human history lies the gnostic science of alchemy. In truth, it little resembles our modern view of a deluded proto-science practiced by mercury-crazed visionaries. Intellects as great, and as widely differing, as Isaac Newton, Leonardo DaVinci and Carl Jung have found important truths within alchemy’s surreal perspective. Newton in fact wrote more on alchemy, although much of it has yet to be published, than he did on any other subject. Jung spent the last decades of his life unraveling the “western yoga” he had glimpsed amid the jumble of alchemical metaphors. There is something about this strange subject that invites the understanding of the curious, the intelligent and the creative.

Yet the image remains in our modern iconography: the medieval “puffer” foolishly working away at his furnaces in vain attempts at turning lead into gold. This view appeals to our sense of scientific smugness, and allows us to dismiss the tradition itself as a discredited and archaic hypothesis. But what if the tradition contains a core of truth, and the “puffers” are no more deluded than the modern historian of science who confidently pigeon-holes alchemy as a precursor to chemistry? What if “alchemy” is something far different than most of us have ever dreamed?

The concept of an alchemist in the 1961 edition of the World Book encyclop?¶dia perpetuated the common misconceptions about alchemy. It’s caption read, “Ancient alchemists once attempted to create humans from chemicals.”

And what if that core of truth touched upon the deepest and most important issues of the human condition?

1. The Apocalypse, the Lost Generation and the Rediscovery of Alchemy

From our late nineties, cosmic end-of-cycle perspective, World War I, “The Great War” to those who lived through it, feels as ancient as all those other senseless wars in history. Our only connections with that conflict are faded sepia-toned images of our ancestors killing each other for reasons vaguely understood even to themselves. Demoted by an even greater war, one so large that nothing but the title World War could possibly encompass it, The Great War became a mere fancy-dress prelude to a century of destruction and horror. Reading of the ideals and passions of that long forgotten era feels embarrassing to us now. If we think of it at all, we assign it an emotional value somewhere between a massive industrial accident and the migration of lemmings to the sea.

A still from a British war film shows action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916.

When we look back through history, we find many wars and disasters, plagues and conquests, volcanic eruptions, climatic changes and mass migrations but we find nothing quite like the Great War. Four hundred years of European intellectual, moral and technical superiority created and fed the engines of industrialized murder. These forces in turn consumed the very social order which had created them. After four years, the self-proclaimed masters of the universe lay broken and bleeding in the wasteland, saved from ultimate extinction only by the interference of the United States and its revolutionary democracy.

Cultural suicide, perhaps? An apocalypse by any other name is still an eschatological event; it’s the end of the world for the inhabitants of that world. For example, near the end of the Great War, in September of 1918, the Turkish 12th Army, holding the ridge line in front of Damascus, which included the ancient mound of Meddigo, was attacked and destroyed by the combined use of airplanes, tanks and cavalry. This battle, eerily described in St. John’s Revelation, Chapter 16, suggests that Armageddon occurred in 1918.

Not only is the battle clearly delineated but it occurred in the midst of the worst plague since the Black Death of the 14th century. Revelation’s apocalypse looks much like the history of the 20th century, leading up to one final millennarial explosion. Could this be true? Was the prophecy of Revelation an ongoing process that essentially started sometime before the Great War? Was the 20th century an unfolding of the final book of the Bible?

When the Great War finally ended, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the old world, with its noble and imperial ways, was well and truly dead. The “victorious” allies propped up the corpse of Europe and, using all the tricks of the undertaker’s trade, gave it the brief appearance of animation. This lasted just long enough to necromancy a treaty together at Versailles. It decomposed soon enough, its stench conditioning Europe for the burned bacon aroma of the Nazi ovens. But while it lasted, this zombie summer of fast fading European superiority galvanized the world.

The epicenter of this fleeting renaissance was Paris, the City of Light. During the war this city had been the goal for which millions of men had marched, fought, bled and died. As it had been for centuries, Paris was a symbol, to both sides in the conflict, of something irrepressible in the human character. After the war, it became a Mecca for all those who felt that the world must be changed somehow by the horror and sacrifice of the war. And that this change must mean something, say something and do something. They came to Paris like insects drawn to the light of immolated cultures, having burned their candles all at once in the final Auto de Fe of European civilization. They firmly believed that out of that conflagration would come a better world.

Parian caf?©s are a center of social activity.

And so they came to Paris to help create that world: mystics, visionaries, painters, poets, artists of all kind, scientists, political thinkers, revolutionaries, all looking for that new world of hope, peace and freedom which, they felt, must grow out of “the war to end all wars.” The conflict had made them all equal now. They mingled on the boulevards, drank and talked at the cafes and bars and bookstalls, plotted and painted late into the night in small cold-water flats in the Montmartre or danced and drank in the nightclubs and demi-monde dives of the Latin Quarter. As if driven by deep rooted survival guilt, everyone wanted to live fast, fully and gloriously. Paris, in the post-apocalyptic Twenties, was the light of the world, the flash point of history. And the beginning of the end of time itself.

Out of this all too brief efflorescence emerged artistic, literary, social, political and scientific concepts that shaped much of the rest of the century. From the Surrealists, such as Hans Arp and Marcel Duchamp, to the mathematics of Paul Dirac, to the literary pyrotechnics of James Joyce, the idea of “transformation” bubbled just below the surface. It was at the zenith of this transformative undercurrent that, in 1926, an anonymous volume - issued in a luxury edition of 300 copies by a small Paris publishing firm known mostly for artistic reprints - rocked the Parisian occult underworld. It’s title was The Mystery of the Cathedrals. The author, “Fulcanelli,” claimed that the great secret of Alchemy, the queen of western occult science, was plainly displayed on the walls of Paris’ own cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris.

Symbolic knowledge is locked within the architectural ornamentation of Notre-Dame and other gothic cathedrals. Understanding the symbology is the key to unlocking the secrets of the ages.

In 1926, Alchemy, by our post-modern lights a quaint and discredited renaissance pseudo-science, was in the process of being reclaimed and reconditioned by two of the most influential movements of the century. Surrealism and psychiatry stumbled onto Alchemy at about the same time, and each attached their own notions about reality to the ancient concept. Carl Jung spent the Twenties teasing out a theory of the archetypal unconscious from the symbolic tapestry of alchemical images and studying how these symbols are expressed in the dream state. The poet-philosopher Andre Breton and the Surrealists made an intuitive leap of faith and proclaimed that the alchemical process could be expressed artistically. Breton, in his 1924 Surrealist manifesto, announced that Surrealism was nothing but alchemical art.

Fulcanelli’s book would have an indirect effect on both of these intellectual movements. Indirect, because the book managed a major literary miracle. It became influential while remaining, apparently, completely unknown outside of French occult and alchemical circles. This is perhaps the strangest of all the mysteries surrounding The Mystery of the Cathedrals.

One illustration suffices to show the magnitude of the occlusion. Take any art history text on the gothic cathedrals written in the last thirty years and look at what it says about the obscure images found on the walls and entrance ways of Notre-Dame. You will find, four times out of five, that alchemy is mentioned as a possible meaning for these vaguely Christian images. You will also find, especially if the text book is in English, that Fulcanelli and The Mystery of the Cathedrals are not given as a source, or mentioned in any way.

A popular TV special on Alchemy, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, uses the very same images from Notre-Dame that Fulcanelli presents, describes them in direct Fulcanelli paraphrase, and never mentions their source. It’s as if the concept entered common usage without ever being individually articulated.

We may call this The-Dog-That-Didn’t-Bark-In-The-Night effect. Like the dog that doesn’t make a sound while the house is robbed, Fulcanelli’s work is conspicuous by its absence. On the other hand the book’s wide-spread influence suggests an importance far beyond the antiquarian idea that the cathedrals were designed as alchemical texts. To understand the silence, we must first understand Fulcanelli.

Early in 1926, publisher Jean Schemit received a visit from a small man dressed as a pre-war Bohemian, with a long Asterix the Gaul style mustache. The man wanted to talk about Gothic architecture, the “green argot” of its sculptural symbols and how slang was a kind of punning code, which he called the “Language of the Birds.” A few weeks later, Mr. Schemit was introduced to him again as Jean-Julien Champagne, the illustrator of a proposed book by a mysterious alchemist called Fulcanelli. Mr. Schemit thought that all three, the visitor, the author and the illustrator, were the same man. Perhaps they were.

Julien Champagne’s self-portrait at age 25.

This is our most credible Fulcanelli sighting. Beyond this, he exists as words on a page and, in some occult circles, as a mythic alchemical immortal with the status, or identity, of a St. Germain. There were two things that everyone agreed upon concerning Fulcanelli. One, he was definitely a mind to be reckoned with, and two, he was a true enigma.

What seems to have happened is that Fulcanelli’s student, a young occult upstart named Eugene Canseliet, offered the publisher the manuscript of The Mystery of the Cathedrals. Schemit bought it and Canseliet wrote a preface for the book in which he stated that the author, his “master” Fulcanelli, had departed this realm. He then goes on to thank Julien Champagne, the man whom Schemit thought was Fulcanelli, for the illustrations.

Eugene Canseliet

Champagne, a minor Symbolist artist and inventor far into an absinthe fueled decline, had gathered around him a small entourage including Canseliet. The talk centered around alchemy when they met in the small cafes of the Montmartre. Champagne lived nearby, in the rue de Rochechouart, and his sixth floor room in the crumbling Parisian tenement was often the scene of late night symposiums on all sorts of occult subjects. To his young friends, he must have seemed like a ghost from another age, with his unfashionably long hair, his riddles, and most of all, his claim to know the secrets of alchemy.

At the time, no one else but Schemit seemed to believe that Julien Champagne was Canseliet’s master, Fulcanelli. His taste for great quantities of Pernod and absinthe indictated a man too dissipated to be as knowledgeable and erudite as the author of Cathedrals. However, he certainly did know a real alchemist, whoever Fulcanelli was, and his illustrations show that he indeed had a profound understanding of the alchemical art.

So we are left with the unsolveable mystery of the missing master alchemist. A man who does not seem to exist, and yet is recreated constantly in the imagination of every seeker. A perfect foil for projection. We might even think it was all a joke, some kind of elaborate hoax, except for the material itself. When one turns to Mystery of the Cathedrals, one finds a witty intelligence who seems quite sure of the nature and importance of his information. This “Fulcanelli” knows something and is trying to communicate his knowledge; of this there can be no doubt.

Fulcanelli’s main point, the key to unraveling the mystery, lies in an understanding of what he calls the “phonetic law” of the “spoken cabala,” or the “Language of the Birds.” This punning, multi-lingual word play can be used to reveal unusual and, according to Fulcanelli, meaningful associations between ideas. “What unsuspected marvels we should find, if we knew how to dissect words, to strip them of their barks and liberate the spirit, the divine light, which is within,” Fulcanelli writes. He claims that in our day this is the natural language of the outsiders, the outlaws and heretics at the fringes of society.

It was also the “green language” of the Freemasons (”All the Initiates expressed themselves in cant,” Fulcanelli reminds us) who built the art gothique of the cathedrals. Ultimately the “art cot,” or the “art of light,” is derived from the Language of the Birds, which seems to be a sort of Ur-language taught by both Jesus and the ancients. It is also related to the Sufi text by Attar the Chemist, entitled “The Conference of the Birds.” In de Tassey’s French translation of this work, which Fulcanelli references, the “conference” of the title is translated as “language.” De Tassey goes on to explain the complex linguist metaphor beneath the simple fable. Fulcanelli uses the same method to decode the alchemical meaning of the cathedrals.

Fulcanelli also claims that Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel is “a novel in cant,” that is, written in the secret language. Offhandedly, he throws in Tiresias, the Greek seer who revealed to mortals the secrets of Olympus. Tiresias was taught the language of the birds by Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Just as casually, Fulcanelli mentions the similarity between gothic and goetic, suggesting that gothic art is a magic art.

From this, we see that Fulcanelli’s message, that there is a secret in the cathedrals, and that this secret was placed there by a group of initiates ¬?¬© of which Fulcanelli is obviously one - depends upon an abundance of imagery and association which overpowers the intellect, lulling one into an intuitve state of acceptance. Fulcanelli, like Shakespeare, overwhelms the reader with his brilliance. It is difficult to accept this man as anything but an incredible intelligence.

But even after careful reading, one finds that the “mystery” of the cathedrals is never explained, and that what one assumes to be the basic mystery of Alchemy is only glancingly delineated. There are allusions that escape the reader as easily as a mosquito glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. At moments, a glimpse of a great truth flits by, giving a hint of something incredible, and then, like the mosquito, it is gone. Cathedrals feels more like a Haiku poem, one that is ephemeral and fleeting. Frustrated, the reader starts over, reading even more carefully, following the allusions and associations, trying to find and pin down the core of meaning that one senses is there, somewhere.

All this makes Cathedrals an almost perfect Surrealist text, a modern alchemical version of Lautreamont’s Chants of Maladoror, the Surrealists’ favorite 19th century novel. Fulcanelli’s use of punning word play to convey spiritual meaning would have delighted the Surrealists. They also embraced Rabelais and understood this kind of linguistic alchemy in terms of the correspondences and connections between objects or ideas on different levels or scales of being. The classic example of this being Lautreamont’s “sudden juxtaposition on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

And yet, even though Fulcanelli’s basic idea - an operational and linguistic alchemy used by sages or Hermetic Philosophers to transform reality - became part of Surrealism’s intellectual currency, none of the Surrealists mention Fulcanelli or Mystery of the Cathedrals. Only Max Ernst makes any allusion to Fulcanelli, in Beyond Painting, published in 1936. However, by the late 1940’s, the work of the movement’s founder, Andre Breton ¬?¬© in both his book, Arcana 17 and the catalogue for the 1947 Surrealist Exhibition ¬?¬© appears to be heavily influenced by Fulcanelli.

The work of the Surrealist Max Ernst.

Surrealism in 1947, the Surrealist exhibition catalogue, is full of seemingly Fulcanelli inspired articles such as “Liberty of Language” by Arpad Mezei. In this article he explains the “occult dialectic through linguistics.” Mezei goes on to announce that language is “really an ensemble of symbols. And this conception of language is not far off that which existed in magical civilizations, because the interchangeability of reality and language. . .is the base and the principal key of all hermetic activity.”

As if to make the point even more pointed, Arpad Mezei and Marcel Jean contributed an article on the occult meaning of the surrealists’ favorite novel The Chants of Maldoror. Their analysis of this novel could be applied just as fruitfully to Mystery of the Cathedrals. Indeed, following Mezei and Jean’s advice by working backwards is a good roadmap for navigating Fulcanelli.

Andre Breton himself contributed a chart to the catalogue for Surrealism in 1947 showing personalities and their associations with the images of the Tarot cards, a continuation of the ideas that he had begun in Arcana 17. While the Tarot is not an obvious connection with Fulcanelli and the Mystery of the Cathedrals., as we will see, Breton’s use of the Tarot as alchemical metaphors suggests that he had read Fulcanelli even closer than most. Ten years later, in 1957, Breton wrote The Art of Magic , in which he insists that magic is an innate capacity of all humanity which can never be long suppressed or controlled. And with that admission, Surrealism takes its place alongside the literary works of Joyce, Lovecraft and Bourges as an important 20th century artistic addition to the western occult tradition.

It would seem that Fulcanelli contributed to that artistic evolution, except the conspicuous absence of direct reference argues against it. Fulcanelli’s ideas seem to be present in Surrealism from its inception, growing more prominent as the movement matured. Possibly one answer lies in the anonymity of Fulcanelli himself. Since “Fulcanelli” is a pseudonym, the Surrealists may have absorbed his ideas from a common source, the real person behind the name.

Yet, even that idea fails to explain the curious reluctance of anyone, Surrealist, art historian and alchemical scholar alike, to address the meaning of Fulcanelli’s work. Once again, this conspicuous absence is very suggestive. Even the great American occult historian Manley P. Hall completely fails to mention Fulcanelli. Many scholarly books written since the 1930’s about alchemy and it’s history fail to mention the two known books by Fulcanelli. Why?

The silence suggests a secret. The “mystery” of the cathedrals is the secret of alchemy in the sense that alchemy is an ancient initiatory science. “Fulcanelli” selected his materials carefully to convey in the clearest and most direct manner possible that he did indeed know the secret. Much has been made by the few occultists who have looked into Fulcanelli and his work about the difficulty of his writing. Threading a path through Fulcanelli’s mine field of classical allusions is daunting to all but those who enjoy sampling ancient wisdom for its own sake. Without a key, the text remains, reading after reading, incomprehensible.

However, as in the Sufi story, the greatest treasure is hidden in plain sight. Fulcanelli slyly directs us with his comment on goetic or magic art. The magic, the secret, is in the art.

Like a message in a bottle from the last initiate, the mystery at the core of alchemy surfaced in 1926 when J. Schemit & Co., released its limited edition of Le Mystere des Cathedrals, by an author who called himself simply “Fulcanelli.” Although apparently well known - at least by reputation - to his contemporaries, Fulcanelli’s true identity remains uncertain to this day. What is certain is that Le Mystere created a sensation among the Parisian occult community.

From our modern perspective, surfeited on newage wonders, it is hard to see why from the book itself. Le Mystere is full of arcane scholarship and obscure erudition, making it hard to follow the book’s symbolic train of thought. In some occult circles this increased its appeal. However, the basic premise of the book - that Gothic cathedrals contain hermetic books in stone - was an old fashioned idea going back to the nineteenth century Romantics, such as Victor Hugo.

In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo spends a whole chapter (Chapter II of Book Five) on the idea that architecture is the great book of humanity, and that the invention of printing and the proliferation of mundane books spelled the end of the sacred book of architecture. He reports that the Gothic era was the sacred architect’s greatest achievement, that the cathedrals were expressions of liberty, the emergence of a new sense of freedom. “This freedom goes to great lengths,” Hugo informs us. “Occasionally a portal, a facade, an entire church is presented in a symbolic sense entirely foreign to its creed, and even hostile to the church. In the thirteenth century, Guillaume of Paris, in the fifteenth Nicholas Flamel, both are guilty of these seditious pages.”

Essentially, Le Mystere is an examination in-depth of those “seditious pages” in stone. Fulcanelli elaborates on the symbolism of certain images found on the walls and porches of Guillaume of Paris’ masterpiece, Notre-Dame de Paris and its close contemporary, Notre-Dame de Amiens. To this he adds images from two houses in the Gothic style from 15th century Bourges. This guided tour of hermetic symbolism is densely obscure, filled with “Green Language” puns and an overwhelming breadth of classical allusions. To the casual reader, and even the dedicated student, this tangled web of scholarship is daunting.

But to the occult savants of Paris in the late 1920’s, it was almost intoxicating. Here, finally, was the word of a man who knew, the voice of the last true initiate. His student, Eugene Canseliet, indirectly but clearly informs us in the preface to the first edition of Le Mystere that Fulcanelli had accomplished the Great Work and then disappeared from the world. “Fulcanelli is no more,” Canseliet assured us, and was lamented by a group of “unknown brothers who hoped to obtain from him the solution to the mysterious Verbum dismissum (missing word).”

This was heady stuff to the fragmented and schism ridden occult community. It was French, it was Alchemy, the Queen of all esoteric arts, and it was real. Credible people had even seen his visiting card, emblazoned with an aristocratic signature. It was possible to encounter people at the Chat Noir nightclub in Paris who claimed to have met Fulcanelli right through World War II. Between 1926 and 1929, the legend grew, fueled by articles and reviews in several Parisian occult journals. Canseliet contributed more information: transmutation had indeed been accomplished by the Master, Fulcanelli hadn’t really disappeared, another book or two was planned, and so on.

By 1929, when Fulcanelli’s second book, Dwellings of the Philosophers, appeared, French occultism was ready for a revelation. What they received however was something of a disappointment, an anti-climax. Canseliet, in his preface to this volume, gives nothing sensational away. Nothing is said about the origin of the work or its relationship to Le Mystere. The reader is left with the sense that Fulcanelli was still alive and on the scene, with only a few bare hints as to his attainments.

The work itself is uneven, without the internal coherence and brilliant symbolic by-play found in Le Mystere. Dwellings follows many of the same themes and symbolic threads as Le Mystere, in fact there is little that is actually new. What Dwellings does however is put our understanding of alchemical adeptship in the 16th and 17th centuries on an entirely different basis. We come to understand that “alchemy” is a very deep and rich stream of tradition, but we are left questioning exactly what “alchemy” is. Fulcanelli seems to shift his focus from lab work to astral voyages to an arcane heritage. The voice that seemed to know so much in Le Mystere is here hesitant and unclear.

The critical response was luke-warm at best. Interest waned, even when Canseliet revealed the existence of a third volume by Fulcanelli, Finis Gloria Mundi, in 1935. By 1937, Fulcanelli was a merely a legend of occult Paris in the ’20’s, and Canseliet had moved on to writing books on alchemy under his own name. All hope of publishing the last volume faded in the depression and crisis of the late ’30’s, and disappeared completely as the Nazis conquered France in the spring of 1940. Nothing is known about Canseliet’s activities during the war.

And yet, a most curious thing happened. In the spring of 1943, a privately printed, 50 copy edition of a massive work entitled The Architecture of Nature was published in Paris with full clearance from the Nazi censors. This is indeed curious, since a large portion of the book deals with the Kabbalah, the esoteric tradition of the Jews, and its relationship to such things as Tantric Yoga, Gothic cathedrals and the enigmatic ornaments of Lallemant Mansion in Bourges, so important to Fulcanelli. Even a glance at this most rare of all modern esoteric volumes is enough to convince the reader that this work contains more than a whiff of the authentic voice, the Fulcanelli of Le Mystere. Could this be the lost third volume? And why would the Nazis permit its publication?

After the war, Fulcanelli’s legend, and Canseliet’s career, profited from an up-surge of interest in all thing metaphysical. By the mid 1950’s, conditions were right to reprint both Le Mystere and Dwellings. Simply by having been the mysterious Fulcanelli’s student, Canseliet had become the Grand Old Man of French alchemy and esotericism. But the ’50s were not the ’20s and many things had changed. One of those things was the text of Le Mystere itself.

©1999 Aethyrea Books

This section of Chapter One of “A MONUMENT TO THE END OF TIME: ALCHEMY, FULCANELLI, AND THE GREAT CROSS” by Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges is presented here as a courtesy from Aethyrea Books.

In his masterwork, The Mystery of the Cathedrals, the anonymous author Fulcanelli poses a riddle: How does a Tree become a Stone, which then becomes a Star?

Of course, being Fulcanelli, he shies away from such blunt simplicity. It was far too much too say openly that the secret of alchemy, and of science in its broadest sense, consisted of a Tree forming a Stone and igniting into a Star. Never mind solving the riddle of how it’s done.

And yet, the careful reader will discern this very enigma at the core of Fulcanelli’s book. Why?

Because the truth is simple. The secret of alchemy is contained in the riddle of how a tree — the Tree of Life, the World Pillar, the Djed — transforms into the Precious Stone of the Wise. And then, the core of the mystery, how that Stone becomes a star, an imperishable light body or perhaps even the body of a star in Orion. However, even though the truth is simple, the secret has a way of protecting itself.

Take Le Mysterie for example. Much has been written about just who “Fulcanelli” might have been, but very little, outside of Canseliet, has been written about what Fulcanelli said. Eugene Canseliet, Fulcanelli’s pupil, took the approach in his works of expanding on Fulcanelli’s alchemical metaphors without venturing a concrete explanation of the process itself. By his own admission, he never succeeded in what he imagined the ultimate goal to be, the transmutation of lead into gold. Therefore, we might be justified to suspect Canseliet’s level of understanding.

But what did Fulcanelli say? Does he actually reveal the secret of alchemy’s riddle?

Understanding Fulcanelli’s masterpiece requires preparation, guidance and more than a little patience. Le Mystere is not literature in the normal sense. It’s an initiation document designed to instruct the reader in a new way of thinking in and about symbols. Fulcanelli is always honest. He never cheats the reader or hides behind his vows of secrecy, but he does insist that the reader do the work. Otherwise the revelation is worthless. Therefore, the initiation takes the form of a puzzle, or a riddle.

For preparation, one could do no better than to read carefully all of Book III and Chapter Two of Book V of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Fulcanelli assumes that any intelligent reader would be aware of this perspective and would basically agree with it. Fulcanelli, in Le Mystere, is trying to provide specific examples of Hugo’s metaphors in stone. A good guide book to Notre-Dame is also valuable, as is a general history of the Gothic period and its cathedrals.

The best preparation however is to forget everything you have ever read or heard about alchemy. Let Fulcanelli explain it to you as if you had never heard the word before. In practical terms, it means skipping Canseliet’s prefaces and Walter Lang’s introduction. Or, at least, save them until last.

When we do this, we start where Fulcanelli started, with an experience, a gnosis, of the transcendent power of a Gothic Cathedral. He tells us that his first sight of a cathedral, at the age of seven, sent him into “an ecstasy, struck with wonder.” Today, the only way to recapture a little of “the magic of such splendor, such immensity, such intoxication expressed by this more divine than human work,” is to stand some quiet summer evening just in front of the railing at the Great Porch of Notre-Dame de Paris and slowly let your vision crawl heavenward over the complex universe of symbolic forms. Bathed in the golden light of sunset, thousands of forms and concepts and images struggle toward some unity of purpose that our modern mind finds all but incomprehensible. But to the child, or the child-like, it has the power of revelation.

book in stoneFulcanelli informs us that the images on the cathedrals speak more clearly than words and books. They are “simple in expression, naive and picturesque in interpretation; a sense purged of subtleties, of allusions ,of literary ambiguities.” The Gothic, he suggests, is like Gregorian chants, many voices coming together in a single note. This is important guidance for understanding the book as a whole. Fulcanelli combines images or voices all juxtaposed on a single note or theme in such a way that every voice is related to the theme as a whole. As in music, the structure that allows this inter-relatedness is based on geometry and mathematics. It is nothing less than the hermetic Grand Theme, the Music of the Spheres, which is depicted within the Gothic cathedrals.

The Grand Theme is introduced by the arrangement and subjects of the nine chapters in part one, called “Le Mystere des Cathedrals.” From its title we can supposed that it was meant to impart an overall viewpoint from which the rest of the book, the details of the pattern, can be understood. Grouping the themes of the nine chapters as presented defines an interesting symbol: the sword in the stone. The first three chapters compose the grip of the subject and the sword, whose basic theme, the hermetic wisdom of the Gothic cathedrals, continues through a stone of five inter-related symbols within the cathedrals, and on into the foundation “stone” of Notre-Dame de Paris. This device also presents the lightning flash order of creation taught by magickal cabalists such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The next three sections fill in this revealed Tree. “Paris,” the second part of Le Mystere, completes the Tree of Life foreshadowed in the first section. This second section, reflecting the archetypal world of the cabalists, gives us the most complete rendition of the Grand Theme of ten spheres and twenty-two paths, including the gnostic Path of Return. “Amiens,” section three, fills in a portion of the developed Tree by giving the reader a deeper understanding of the planetary processes. The fourth section, “Bourges,” juxtaposes a series of mythological images on the planetary spheres, creating a fourth Tree. Therefore each of the “locations” or spheres have multiple images from which a meaning can be derived.

The added chapter from the second edition of Le Mystere, “The Cyclic Cross of Hendaye,” completes this pattern by crossing the abyss from Daat, gnosis, to Kether, the divine Crown. The key of course is that in the world of action, the fourth world or level of abstraction to the medieval cabalist, the Tree is formed in space. The Hendaye chapter completes this view by revealing the secret of an ancient astro-alchemical science based on the alignment of local events with the galactic axis.

In our book, “A Monument to the End of Time: alchemy, fulcanelli and the great cross, we examine in detail Fulcanelli’s use of this hermetic Tree of Life pattern. This introduction however is for the first time reader, or the reader who wishes to read Fulcanelli as if it were the first time. For that person, we can only admonish them to pay close attention to the images discussed and the illustrations. Fulcanelli is carefully building an inherent or implicate order by his use of patterns of images. Even the transpositions and other “mistakes” or departures from the established order are designed to impart some significance.

So who was Fulcanelli?

One of the benefits of reading Mystery of the Cathedrals without preconceptions is that the personality of Fulcanelli jumps off the page. This is the strongest evidence against the committee theory. It is hard to imagine how a committee could have arrived at such a clear sense of personality, and who among the group had the literary skills to pull it off? Canseliet? If that is the case, then literature lost one of its finest novelists when Eugene Canseliet turned to alchemy.

As we wind our way through Mystery of the Cathedrals, Fulcanelli becomes a trusted guide, always directing our attention to the key points, but always letting us make our own conclusions. As he does so, we find that a few hints and suggestions leak through concerning Fulcanelli himself. By the second or third careful reading, a profile emerges.

Fulcanelli was born in Picardy, a day’s ride or a little more from Amiens, whose cathedral he first glimpsed with such lasting effect as a seven year-old. His family was formally noble, or even royal, but had come down somewhat by his birth. At an early age, he moved to Paris, becoming a student in the Latin Quarter. His field of study seems to have been classical literature, with a side interest in medieval history. So much is clear. What’s hazy is which century it happened in.

Most commentators have assumed it was the 19th, since Fulcanelli was apparently about 80 in 1930, which makes him born around 1850. However, the personality that confronts one on the page is decidedly 18th century. There are even clues that Fulcanelli was in Paris before 1748, making him around 200 years old in 1930. However, a close reading of the first chapter of the first section reveals that Fulcanelli could have been present in the early 15th century. How old was he?

From Mystery of the Cathedrals we can discern a vague profile. He studied in Paris between 1740 and 1760, and joined some magickal lodge or society in the decades before the fall of the Ancien Regime in 1789. He seems to have spent the 19th century traveling across France collecting evidence of the existence of his order and its predecessors. After the Great War, he decided to publish an initiatory document, The Mystery of the Cathedrals, an examination of the order’s symbolism, Dwellings of the Philosophers, and a revelation, The Final Glory of the World, of which all that remains may be the Hendaye chapter.

Of course, this profile raises more questions than it answers. But we are left with the feeling that Fulcanelli was a real person, with a message to deliver.

Perhaps the only way to truly understand Fulcanelli and his masterpiece is to take your now well-thumbed copy of Mystery of the Cathedrals and go to France. The major locations can all be visited in a week or more, and a month or so of vagabondage will allow you to cover everything mentioned in Mystery. It is well worth the experience.

Two examples should give the reader the flavor. Nothing in the literature of either alchemy or eschatology describes so eloquently their inter-relationship as does the Great Porch of the Last Judgment at Notre-Dame de Paris. We come looking for Fulcanelli’s Path of Return images and find them on the supports for the pillars of the Last Judgment. The quintessential image of Alchemy occupies the base of the central pillar which leads to Christ in Judgment. This says so much more clearly than any words can that the End of the World has for its foundation the science of Alchemy.

templar churchAnother example is Fulcanelli’s use of clever side comments. Twice, in significant places, he mentions a church at Luz in the Pyrennes. In his only use of the word Templar in the entire book, Fulcanelli labels the church as Templar in his second mention. This should grab our attention. And if it does, and we make the long trek to the High Pyrennes, we will find that someone knew the key to the mystery right down to the 19th century. Fulcanelli doesn’t tell you it’s there, he merely assumes that you will find it if you look.

The houses in Bourges are not to be missed, both are open to the public. Tours in English are held in Notre-Dame de Paris on Saturday at 2 PM, and are essential. Everything closes for lunch, except Notre-Dame. Be sure to visit Hendaye on Wednesday mornings when the town square is full of vendors. Go looking for the Saint Marcellus statue on the south side of Notre-Dame de Paris. Demand that the guide in Jacques Coeur’s house show you the pentagonal treasure room. Seek and ye shall find!

How does a Tree become a Stone and then a Star?

Simple. The eternal polar axis of our celestial sphere, whose equator is the sun’s apparent motion against the stars, or the zodiac, forms the middle pillar of a cosmic Tree of Life. This Tree is also found within our bodies, and when we align these Trees and project them outward on the celestial sphere we create a jeweled sphere, The Precious Stone of the Wise, in which forms the Cube of Space. The Tree has become a Stone.

The next step, from Stone to Star, requires the transformation of light. Aligned properly, the Precious Stone can tell us the quality of time and the physics of creation. Internalized, this projected alignment leads to bursts of light, flashes of kundalini. If the process is supported by dark retreat and sudden light immersion, then it is possible that the entire body could be transformed. Something similar seems to have happened in the case of Padmasambhava, the Tantric master who brought Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century.

But, given the information in the Hendaye chapter, then it is just possible that our species is on the verge of a mass initiation experience triggered by the “new” light from the center of the galaxy. Perhaps Fulcanelli’s “double catastrophe” is both physical and mental. When the Light of the Star shines into our souls, will we be ready for the change?

The Tree of Life unites our universe across vast scales of existence. When we identify with that immensity, we expand as we try to encompass it all. The flash of gnosis is the result, and from that, if we are lucky, comes the science of alchemy.

Fulcanelli has given us excellent guidance on the process. He shows us how the initiation worked in the past, and points toward the mass initiation that may be unavoidable in our future. When Isis, the Great Cosmic Womb of the Galaxy gives birth to the new Horus Light of transformation, let us hope that we have all solved the riddle of becoming a star.

Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt. “All that is, is Light.”

©1999 Vincent Bridges

By Vincent Bridges, co-author of A Monument to the End of Time
All photos © copyright Darlene and Aethyrea Books, 1999

In his novel, Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo spends a whole chapter (Chapter II of Book Five) on the idea that architecture is the great book of humanity, and that the invention of printing and the proliferation of mundane books spelled the end of the sacred book of architecture. He reports that the Gothic era was the sacred architect’s greatest achievement, that the cathedrals were expressions of liberty, the emergence of a new sense of freedom. “This freedom goes to great lengths,” Hugo informs us. “Occasionally a portal, a facade, an entire church is presented in a symbolic sense entirely foreign to its creed, and even hostile to the church. In the thirteenth century, Guillaume of Paris, in the fifteenth Nicholas Flamel, both are guilty of these seditious pages.”

Hugo’s basic point is correct. Those medieval artists who created with such exuberance were trying to communicate important truths. They believed with an intensity that allowed them to work patiently for lifetimes on the same symbolic framework. Standing in front of the western front of Notre Dame de Paris and trying to absorb this explosion of imagery and information, our modern sensibilities allow us to see little more than its obvious Christian symbology. But when we look closer, we find that these are indeed unorthodox, if not seditious, pages in stone.

Take for instance that unusual image of a woman with a book and a ladder reaching the clouds behind her. The guidebook calls it philosophy, but why is it on the base of the plinth that leads upward to the image of the Last Judgment? Or those strange images along the sides of the portal.

The guidebook suggests that they are vices and virtues but upon examination they dissolve into a welter of paradox and medieval surrealism.

We recognize the power of the images, but can we understand their message?

Yes, but to do so, we must learn a new language - the ABCs of symbolism. For this purpose, the daunting hermetic libraries in stone of the great cathedrals, Notre Dame de Paris, Amiens, Bourges, are too overwhelming and complex. Before we face such complexity, we need a primer and for that we must turn to the south and the ancient Imperial city of Arles, the Cathedral of St. Trophime and the true origin of the Grail legends.

When Hannibal crossed the Rhone a few miles north of present-day Arles in 218 BCE, the Gallo-Greek settlement of Theline was already a trading post of some note. Under the Romans, who called it Arelate, the city retained its commercial status and flourished. Christianity arrived before the middle of the first century, brought, according to legend, by St. Trophimus. Curiously enough, St. Trophimus dedicated the very first shrine to the Virgin here, even before her death. By the late 1st century CE, Arles had become an ecclesiastical center, a position it would retain for the next four centuries, partly on the strength of its legendary cemetery, the Alyscamps.

Perhaps the most famous necropolis of the medieval era, the Alyscamps (from Elisii Campi or Elysian Fields) owed its fame to St. Trophimus. Built outside the city walls, as were all Roman cemeteries, and along the Via Aurelia, the main road to Italy and Rome, the Alyscamps was a perfect location for secret meetings. St. Trophimus soon attracted a following and in the year before he died, probably 52 CE, he invoked a blessing on the cemetery. Christ himself attended the ceremony and left the imprint of His knee on a sarcophagus lid. Burial at Alyscamps became so desirable that bodies were shipped from all Europe for burial in its holy grounds. The 12th century chronicle of the Pseudo-Turpin informs us that the peers of Charlemagne, Roland and the other fallen heroes, were transported with great difficulty to the Alyscamps.

Arles therefore is ground zero for whatever version of Christianity it was that swept the region in those early years. If we are looking for the origin of those seditious pages in stone, then Arles is a likely place to look. In Mystery of the Cathedrals, the enigmatic alchemist Fulcanelli directs us here, to Arles, the Alyscamps and to the Cathedral of St. Trophime in particular, with several tantalizing references. He points out to us a rose cross ankh on a sarcophagus lid at St. Honore in the Alsycamps and bids us pay close attention to the tympanum on the Great Portal of St. Trophime.

Built in the mid 5th century by St. Hilaire and originally dedicated to St. Stephan, the Cathedral was rebuilt in the 11th century and the Great Portal was finished a century later in time for the coronation of Frederick I Barbarossa as King of Arles in 1178. Rededicated to St. Trophime when the relics of his miracle were moved from the Alyscamps in 1152, the Cathedral failed to retain the sacred cache of its Saint’s miraculous status, probably because the Holy Stone, the sarcophagus lid with the knee print, had disappeared. This missing Stone, which conferred “knowledge of the Living Christ,” to those who beheld it and ” certainty of resurrection and eternal life” to those sacred dead who slept in its embrace, according to the 12th century “Golden Legends,” might just be the origin point of all the later Holy Grail legends.

Consider that, although Chretien de Troyes had invented all the other trappings of the Arthurian legends, the Matter of Britain as it was known in the Middle Ages, in his earlier works before 1180 or so, there is no hint that he had any idea of anything remotely resembling the Grail. Then, he was supposedly given an ancient manuscript “in the Breton tongue” by Phillip of Flanders and asked to render the material into an epic poem, which became Perceval, or the History of the Grail.
So where did Phillip of Flanders come by the story? Chretien doesn’t tell us much and although there have been many suggested sources, we just don’t know. However, Wolfram von Eschenbach, author of Parsival, a complete version of the story that Chretien only began, tells us that he had the true story from its source: one Kyot or Guyot of Provence.

This is an important clue, because there was a Guyot de Provins, a troubadour poet. And there is only one place that a young squire soon to be knight such as Wolfram could have met Guyot de Provins: at the coronation of Frederick I Barbarossa as King of Arles in 1178. Guyot de Provins was there, in the company of the Lords of Baux, a curious clan from the Alpilles north of Arles who claimed descent from Balthazar, one of the three magi. We are less certain that Wolfram was there, but it does seem probable, as it been determined from the texts of his poems that he entered the service of Frederick I Barbarossa at an early age.

We can be certain however that Phillip of Flanders and his sister-in-law Marie de Champagne did attend, as they are prominently listed among the assembled nobles in various sources. Thus, on this one occasion, all of the people involved in the creation and propagation of what would later be the Grail legends crossed paths in Arles. And curiously enough, also in Arles, we find the veneration of a Holy Stone with miraculous properties.

Perhaps this is more than coincidental, as there are political considerations as well. At the treaty of Vienne (another ancient Imperial city up the Rhone) in 1177, Frederick had been forced to acknowledge the authority of Pope Alexander III, effectively ending Frederick’s bid to re-establish an Empire in the West. Accepting the crown of the ancient Imperial province of Arles was for Frederick I Barbarossa, already Holy Roman Emperor, a kind of lateral move that can be considered as a way to establish connections with an even more ancient, and perhaps more legitimate form of Christianity. His coronation in the spring of 1178 at the newly finished Cathedral of St. Trophime signalled a shift in focus, one that would lead, a decade later, to Frederick’s taking charge of the Third Crusade and his death in the wilds of Armenia.

So, let us imagine for a moment that we are standing in the square in front of the Cathedral that bright May Sunday in 1178, waiting for the appearance of the Emperor and examining the almost complete decorations of the Great Portal. (The fact that the Portal has been cleaned and somewhat restored in recent years helps us in this. Its figures and friezes are as vivid today as they would have been in 1178, since these were never painted.)

The first thing we notice is the classical elegance of the Great Portal. It reminds us of other Roman Provencal Arches, most powerfully the one at Glanum. Above the Portal, the front of the Cathedral is plain, pulling our eye upward to the angel at the top. The obtuse angle of the top of the Portal breaks the flow and directs us back to the Portal itself, but the upward pull remains.

However, this triumphal arch is dedicated to the Last Judgment, seen here as a blend of John’s Apocalypse, the Gospel of Matthew, local legends and hermetic wisdom. The 11 small putti that line the angle of the roof of the Great Portal are a perfect example of the hermetic wisdom. They represent the 11 great circles needed to orient the earth, sun and the center of the galaxy, as well as the esoteric higher zodiac of 11 paired signs that would eventually become the Trumps of the Tarot. They can also be seen as a reference to the Tree of Life, with 10 sephirot and one access point, Daat or gnosis. All of these concepts are related, and are symbolised here on the portal as the highest level of wisdom related to the Last Judgment.

From this, our glance is drawn through the three veils of the negative (Ayn, Ayn Soph and Ayn Soph Aur), symbolized by the three receding levels of the arch, to the central arch itself. There, Christ Triumphant is seated on a throne within a vesica piscis holding the Book of Life and surrounded by the kerubic forms of the Evangelists and with a choir of 18 paired angels up in the arch. As we look closer at the Evangels, we notice that they are also the fixed signs of the zodiac, but the arrangement is unusual.

They can be seen as pillars; Leo/Aquarius and Scorpio/Taurus on each side, but note that each of these is actually opposite each other in the zodiac. Properly aligned they cross, making a 90-degree division of the celestial circle. To get any kind of astrological sense out of the arrangement on the tympanum one makes a zig-zag cross pattern that when completed forms two triangles, one up, one down, with points touching. This pattern also reveals to us two out of the three celestial axes.

Keep this in mind, because the entire movement adopted this key symbology. Look for instance at the tympanum of Chartres Cathedral and you will see the same unusual arrangement. The meaning is connected with the Cube of Space/New Jerusalem eschatology of St. John’s Apocalypse and blended with that of the Philosopher’s Stone and even the Holy Grail.

Below on the lintel are the Apostles, flanked by angels and on either side, the Elect and the Damned. Below that is a narrow frieze depicting the story of the Magi and the Massacre of the Innocent. This is interesting because of the support of the Lords of Baux, who claimed descent from Balthazar, one of the Magi, and the importance Fulcanelli, in Le Mystere des cathdrales, puts on these legends.

Under the Magi frieze are the figures of the saints separated by columns. There are six polished marble columns on the front, and four rougher columns facing in toward the portal, our ten sephirot, with the centre pillar making eleven, Daat or gnosis. There are two more pillars on the side, facing out, for a total of thirteen. Under each column is a symbolic figure.
All of these connections are significant and tell a very different story, even superficially, than one would expect. But the symbolic component is unique. Many of the motifs that we will find later explicated in detail on the great cathedrals can be found in symbolic broad strokes on the Great Portal.

One example of this will have to suffice. The two alignments given in the tympanum, Leo/Aquarius and Taurus/Scorpio, recur among the symbolic figures under the columns. Other curious features, including a Greek key on the forehead of a Leo figure, point us in strange directions. But, to make all this work, on any level, we must be given the key of that third celestial alignment, from north to south ecliptic pole.

However, under the figure of St. Trophime as Bishop of Arles, there is an unmistakable figure of that alignment. The north ecliptic pole falls in Draco and the southern pole on the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Traditionally, this was symbolized as the union of the Dragon/Snake and the Turtle. As can be clearly seen, St. Trophime, holding a curious stone or book, stands on the back of a giant turtle and a snake. The snake in fact is also under the pillar, reinforcing the image of the celestial axis. We find this same key symbol on the front of Notre Dame de Paris in the image of St. Marcel and the Dragon.

From this we can glimpse a larger pattern behind both the Grail legends and the hermetic libraries of the great cathedrals, one that is, as suggested by Wolfram’s source, astronomical in form. Wolfram claimed that Guyot had unravelled the mystery and found a way to create a genealogy of the Grail family. From this information, Wolfram would come to focus on Parsival and a real historical figure - Guillaume de Gellone - whose family takes us back to Septimania and the ancient Jewish Goths of Languedoc.

Perhaps, vicariously and just for a moment, we can share the enthusiasm of the crowd that day as Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor and the newly crowned King of Arles, stood on the steps in front of the Great Portal, the high gold crown and the flaming red beard catching the clear afternoon sunlight of a Provencal spring. From this point, the larger current of the Gothic Revival would coalesce into the initiatory and chivalric current of the Grail Legends, offering us a dual track glimpse of the alchemical and hermetic wisdoms contained in the Gothic books in stone.
Monty!

An examination of the pattern revealed by the first nine chapters in part one of Mystery of the Cathedrals, by Vincent Bridges, co-author of A Monument to the End of Time: Alchemy, Fulcanelli and the Great Cross. The first section of Fulcanelli’s masterpiece shows the sword of wisdom, built from language and experience, is extracted from the stone of the wise, whose five components could all be found, at one time, in Notre-Dame de Paris, the Philosopher’s Church.

“The strongest impression of my early youth ¬?¬© I was seven years old — an impression of which I still retain a vivid memory, was the emotion aroused in my young heart by the sight of a gothic cathedral.” The opening words of Fulcanelli’s masterpiece, Le Mystere des Cathedrals, places us firmly in the personal. Fulcanelli, from the very first sentence of the book, strikes us as a real person with a message to communicate. “I was immediately enraptured by it. I was in ecstasy, struck with wonder, unable to tear myself away…”

Here is passion, the beginning of a lifelong involvement, an attempt to get to the heart of “the magic of such splendor.” It never faded, Fulcanelli tells us: “I have never acquired a defense against a sort of rapture when faced with those beautiful picture books erected in our closes and raising to heaven their pages of sculptured stone.”

And so, in his third paragraph, Fulcanelli clearly tells the reader the reason for his work. “In what language, by what means, could I express my admiration? How could I show my gratitude to those silent masterpieces, those masters without words and without voice?” How better indeed than to write a volume explicating, for those who could read the symbolism, the great teachings contained in those “pages of sculptured stone?”

But of course, as Fulcanelli immediately reminds us, they are not without words or voice. “If those stone books have their sculptured letters — their phrases in bas-relief and their thoughts in pointed arches — nevertheless they speak also through the imperishable spirit which breathes from their pages.” This imperishable spirit makes them clearer than their younger brothers, manuscripts and printed books, because “it is simple in expression, naive and picturesque in interpretation; a sense purged of subtleties, of allusions, of literary ambiguities.”

It is this Voice of the Imperishable Spirit, Fulcanelli suggests, which speaks “the gothic of the stones.” He links this emotive “language” to the grand theme of music by suggesting that even Gregorian chants can “but add to the emotions which the cathedral itself has already aroused.”

At the very beginning of the book then, Fulcanelli is slyly informing us that he has personally experienced the Voice of that Imperishable Spirit which gives its auditor the ability to understand “the gothic of the stones.” He knows, in the ancient sense of gnosis, the secret behind the symbolism. Here in fact we are reminded of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s insistence, in Parzival, that the mystery of the Grail, the lapis exillis, could only be understood by one who had learned his “ABC’s without the aid of Black Magic.” The language of this mystery can only be interpreted by those who have had the initiatory and illuminatory experience.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, author of Parsival, is shown second from the left in this rare 14th century manuscript. Wolfram described the Holy Grail in terms of a stone.

From this subtle declaration of intent, Fulcanelli moves on to a bold statement on the value of the gothic cathedral “as a vast concretion of ideas” in which the “religious, secular, philosophical or social thoughts of our ancestors” can be read. He develops this idea by showing how the sacred and the profane mingled in the civic uses of the cathedrals, from guild rituals to funerals to commodity markets.

In this shift, we sense a slight-of-hand trick taking place under our very eyes. With dizzying suddenness, we have changed our focus from the nature and meaning of language and initiation to the practical details of a laboratory for their explication. The cathedral we are told is “an original work of incomparable harmony; but not one, it seems, concerned entirely with religious observance.” Fulcanelli assures us that along with “the fervent inspiration, born of a strong faith” there exists “an almost pagan spirit.” This allows the cathedrals to express “the thousand and one preoccupations of the great heart of the people” in a way that reveals “the declaration of its conscience, its will, the reflection of its thought at its most complex, abstract, essential and autocratic.”

There is something almost morphogenic in this declaration, as if the cathedrals were a chrysalis for the larvae form of humanity. The carapace of Christianity is necessary, in this view, to mold a collective cosmological and religious framework within which a deeper, and older, understanding of the mysteries can be allowed to grow and evolve. As if to demonstrate the point more clearly, Fulcanelli ends his first chapter with a long description of the ancient hermetic processional fairs, such as the Feast of Fools and the Feast of the Donkey.

These two feasts, celebrated in the fall and in the spring, marked the link-pins of the ancient pagan year, Samhain and Beltane, which fall traditionally on the cusp of Scorpio/Sagittarius and Taurus/Gemini, the pole or pillar of galactic alignment from center to edge of the galaxy. Fulcanelli’s choice of these two examples can’t be considered as mere coincidence.

Cathedral Building

Indeed, it is at this point that Fulcanelli lapses into a symbolic language. Where before he has been vague but understandable, he now begins to use symbolism to both hide and, to those who know, reveal his meaning. Here, at the very beginning and in common idiom, Fulcanelli presents us with the secret, but, before “the authority of the disguised science” is recognized, many other images will have to be sorted through. The ecstatic cries of the “feast day of feast days” do mark the progress of the triumphal chariot of Bacchus with its male and female centaurs, however what is signified by these ritual celebrations remains obscure until the key to the mystery is revealed.

This is also true, to an even greater degree, for the Feast of the Donkey. This ancient celebration of the Christ-bearer whose hooves trod the streets of Jerusalem is filled with hermetic overtones, and Fulcanelli points us toward the suggestive meanings of sabot, hoof or top, and its association with the cabalists and the Epiphany cake. At the same time, Fulcanelli confuses the issue by throwing in references to other feasts and celebrations, some of which are seemingly unrelated. However, as we will see, even Fulcanelli’s digressions are not without meaning.

Such is the content of Fulcanelli’s first chapter, a pithy twelve paragraphs of pure mystification. Boiled down it says that the gothic cathedrals are an expression of an imperishable spirit, a voice which spoke to the author from an early age. Listening to that voice allowed the author to understand “the Tradition, Science and Art” from their stone pages, that is to learn the “ABC’s” of the secret language. But, we are given to understand, the cathedrals were also the stage and setting for other more obscure ceremonies, ones that had “a hermetic meaning, often a very precise one.” Fulcanelli ends by drawing our attention to the fall and spring feasts and their symbolic attributions.

The cathedrals, Fulcanelli seems to be suggesting, were laboratories for the evolution of the human spirit, the elevation of the soul by the unification of heaven and earth, and that even the churchmen themselves didn’t quite understand this function. What makes this assertion even more remarkable is the feeling Fulcanelli conveys of actual experience. He leaves the reader convinced that he has indeed seen these festivals, at least in his mind’s eye, and has for sure spent many hours meditating on the “fervent inspiration” of its design.

This crowning experience, this gnosis, is the starting point of a flash of illumination that Fulcanelli will use to reveal the essential pattern at the core of the alchemical Tree of the Life. To the cabalist, the lightning flash, the creative sequence of the unfolding Light, reveals the underlying structure of reality. In the same way, Fulcanelli uses his experience of the cathedrals, his gnosis, to reveal the core pattern at the heart of the mystery. In the symbolic cabala, this lightning flash becomes the flaming sword which protects the Garden of Eden from human rehabitation. In Fulcanelli’s hands, the image becomes the sword in the stone, the alchemical extraction of knowledge from the stone of the wise which initiates the Golden Age here on earth.

The pattern emerges clearly in the first three chapters. Following the lightning flash, if the first chapter is the point of light, then chapter two is the light’s expansion into the world of space/time. And so in that chapter, Fulcanelli tells us of the medical school and the Saturday meetings of alchemists at “the little Porte-Rouge,” clues to those who knew and made use of the cathedrals’ secrets. He quotes Victor Hugo to direct us — if we haven’t made the connection before — to his works, particularly The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. (The whole of Book Three and Chapter Two of Book Five should be read as a prologue to Fulcanelli’s work.) Chapter two concludes with another glimpse of Fulcanelli’s motivation. “Indeed I shall consider myself satisfied and amply rewarded if I have been able to awaken the curiosity of the reader, to hold the attention of the shrewd observer and to show to lovers of the occult that it is not impossible even now to rediscover the meaning of the secrets hidden under the petrified exterior of this wondrous book of magic.”

Chapter three of MotC, whose subject is the secret language, has been examined in depth in A Monument to the End of Time. As we noted, this is the key chapter to understanding the rest of the book. Together with the first two chapters, it completes the supernatural triad at the top of the Tree of Life. We can also think of the triad as the pommel of a sword whose blade is the extension of the idea through the stone of symbolism into the reality of Notre-Dame, the philosopher’s church.

To pull the sword from the stone, it is necessary to grip, or grasp, the ideas supplied by the handle or pommel. The first three stages of the lightning flash form a pattern from which the rest of its path unfolds. Fulcanelli combines these ideas with his subject, the cathedrals, in such a way as to compel us to look deeper and closer at the symbols expressed within those cathedrals. In the remaining chapters of part one of Le Mystere des Cathedrals, Fulcanelli suggests that the symbolic components of those “books in stone” are five-fold and that they form, within themselves, the key to the mystery.

ONE

The lightning flash zags across the abyss as it passes from Binah to Hesed, from Understanding to Mercy. Thus the flash creates its own reflection, and the reflection of the upper three stages in the sequence, as it travels down toward matter. Fulcanelli follows this pattern and his fourth chapter focuses on the literal symbolism of the cross as the basic plan for all gothic churches. The shift from theoretical discussions of the language of the birds to the literality of a cathedral’s ground plan is sharp enough to suggest the pathless spark of transmission from Binah to Hesed, while the subject of chapter four, the cross, directs our attention to life itself.

Floor plan of Notre-Dame Cathedral with Tree of Life superimposed.

According to Fulcanelli, all gothic churches, with rare exceptions, are laid out in the form of a Latin cross, which he tells us “is the alchemical hieroglyph of the crucible,” since crucible and cross are derived from the same Latin root. And here, Fulcanelli begins to play his symbolic shell game. “It is indeed in the crucible that the first matter suffers the Passion, like Christ himself.”

Unless we understand the need to connect the cross to the idea of Mercy as conveyed by the fourth sephiroth or stage in the unfolding sequence, we will not quite follow Fulcanelli’s sudden shifts of tone and meaning. His Christian take is somewhat surprising here until we realize that it is the “mercy” brought by the experience of the cross that he is trying to convey. The Passover lamb roasted on a cross of transformation makes a good literal symbol of God’s mercy. But Fulcanelli of course is taking the obvious one step further.

“Remember too, my brother alchemists, that the cross bears the imprint of the three nails used to sacrifice the Christ-body,” Fulcanelli reminds us, like a carnival barker pointing to the pea. As we will discover, much later in our inquiry, these three nails are the anchor points of the three axis of the galaxy, the clue to understanding the true ancient nature of the cross.

After shuffling with St. Augustine and the Paschal lamb, Fulcanelli comes to the point. “The cross is a very ancient symbol, used in all ages, in all religions, by all peoples, and one would be wrong to consider it as a special emblem of Christianity.” Here’s the pitch: can you find the pea of truth under all the Christian special pleading?

He gives us a hint. “We say further that the ground plan of the great religious buildings of the Middle Ages, by the addition of a semi-circular or elliptical apse joined to the choir, assumes the shape of the Egyptian hieratic sign of the crux ansata, the anhk, which signifies universal life hidden in matter.” He points to an example of this from the crypts of St. Honore at Arles, a sarcophocus lid from the first century that echoes the rose cross anhks of the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Rose Ankh cross from the Coptic Museum

To make sure we grasp his point, he adds that the anhk is also the sign of Venus in astrology and copper in alchemy. Traditionally, this anhk sign is the only form of the cross to contain the complete Tree of Life. The first six sephiroth, from Kether to Tiphareth, form the loop, Hod and Netzach are the cross arms, while Yesod and Malkuth complete the lower arm. Fulcanelli emphasizes the completeness and ubiquity of this process and then begins to shuffle metaphors once more.

The Ankh contains all the sephiroth of the Tree of Life.

The cross metamorphizes into a stone. “It is thus that the ground plan of a Christian building reveals to us the qualities of the first matter, and its preparation by the sign of the cross, which points the way for the alchemist to obtain the first stone — the corner stone of the philosopher’s Great Work.” Fulcanelli raises the stakes by telling us that “on this stone… Jesus built his church,” and by insisting that the medieval Freemasons did the same symbolically, giving the undressed, rough stone the image of the devil.

The Ankh superimposed upon the floor plan of Notre-Dame.

Fulcanelli tells us that once just such a “hieroglyph” could be found within Notre-Dame de Paris. This “figure of the devil,” called Master Peter of the Corner, was located at the corner of the choir rail, under the rood screen and this smudged and blackened stone was used by the congregation to snuff their candles. Fulcanelli instructs us that this stone which “was intended to represent the first matter of the work, personified under the aspect of Lucifer (the morning star), was the symbol of our corner stone, the headstone of the corner.” He cites a 17th century reference about the stone the builder rejected and then directs us to the very first specific image from Notre-Dame mentioned in the book, a bas-relief of Jesus blessing an oddly shaped stone in the arch of an absidal chapel on the north side of the cathedral.

Somehow the cross, the anhk, became a stone, and not just any stone, but the rejected stone which became the headstone of the corner, the support on which Jesus built his church. And somehow this is “the first matter,” “the First Stone,” the corner stone of the alchemical Great Work? Just how does a tree — the anhk contains the entire Tree of Life and the cross is a component of the World Tree — become a stone?

Herein are revealed great mysteries, to echo our occult carnival barker. Fulcanelli has presented us with the first part of a conundrum, the unraveling of which will take us into deep waters indeed.

The answer seems to lie with the ancient myths of the World Tree, at whose feet, in many if not most of the very ancient myths, there can be found a stone or cube that is somehow plugging up the torrent of the deluge. Giorgio de Santilla and Hertha von Dechend uncovered this motif as part of their epic examination of the transmission of precessional information through the medium of mythology in Hamlet’s Mill. Their scholarship suggests a connection between the Ark, which in Summerian myth is a perfect cube, and the foundation stone which stops the flood. In another version of the ancient Summerian Noah/Utnapishtim myths, there is no ark at all, just a cubic stone with a pillar on top that stretches from earth to heaven and plugs the entrance to the watery abyss.

This idea is also found in Jewish mythology. The Eben Shetiyyaah, the foundation stone uncovered by King David on Mt. Zion, was thought to cap the watery abyss beneath the Holy of Holies. The idea of a stone, the white altar of tradition, holding back the flood of chaos and catastrophe survived within Christianity. In addition to Fulcanelli’s Master Peter of the Corner, similar images are found in Russian and Germanic prayers, where the fire blackened stone, Christ’s throne and the habitation of the Devil, symbolized the entrance to hell, whose fires are safely contained by its bulk. A German prayer, quoted in Hamlet’s Mill seems even more explicit. “In Christ’s Garden, there is a well, in the well there is a stone, under the stone lies a golden scorpion.”

The first of our five symbolic components, the stone from which the sword of wisdom is extracted, is the cross/stone of space/time itself, the Cube of Space formed from the three axis of the galaxy. Fulcanelli seems to understand this in a way that is even more comprehensive than that of Santilla and Dechend’s scholarship. And with that deep and ancient understanding, Fulcanelli is pointing us toward the truth about the alchemical and transformative nature of Christianity.

The Tree can also become a stone when the lightning flash from which it is formed strikes the ground. These Zebedee stones, so-called from the sons of thunder, John and James, in the New Testament, are crystalizations of a subtle energy, electricity, lightning, grounded into matter. Along with meteorites, these thunderstones have always been considered sacred, as in the Ka’aba of Mecca and the benbens of Heliopolis.

In many ways, Fulcanelli validates our reading of