Vincent Bridges

In 1926, a mysterious volume issued in a luxury edition of three hundred copies by a small Paris publishing firm known mostly for artistic reprints rocked the Parisian occult underworld. Its title was Le Myst?®re des Cath?©drales (The Mystery of the Cathedrals.) The author, “Fulcanelli,” claimed that the great secret of alchemy, the queen of Western occult sciences, was plainly displayed on the walls of Paris‚Äôs own cathedral, Notre-Dame-de-Paris.

Alchemy, by our post-modern lights a quaint and discredited Renaissance pseudo-science, was in the process of being reclaimed and reconditioned in 1926 by two of the most influential movements of the century. Surrealism and psychology stumbled onto alchemy at about the same time, and each attached their own notions of its meaning to the ancient science. 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 Andr?© 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.

A youthful Jean-Julien Champagne

In the fall of 1925, publisher Jean Sch?©mit 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 ‚Äúgreen argot‚Äù of its sculptural symbols, and how slang was a kind of punning code, which he called the ‚Äúlanguage of the birds.‚Äù A few weeks later, Sch?©mit was introduced to him again as Jean-Julien Champagne, the illustrator of a proposed book by a mysterious alchemist called Fulcanelli. Sch?©mit thought that all three, the visitor, the author, and the illustrator, were the same man. Perhaps they were.

This, such as it is, amounts to our most credible Fulcanelli sighting. As such, it sums up the entire problem posed by the question: Who was Fulcanelli? Beyond this ambiguous encounter, 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 - he was definitely a mind to be reckoned with, and he was a true enigma.

We are left then with the mystery of the missing master alchemist. He is a man who does not seem to exist, and yet he is recreated constantly in the imagination of every seeker‚Äîa 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 Le Myst?®re, one finds a witty intelligence that seems quite sure of the nature and importance of his information. This ‚ÄúFulcanelli‚Äù knows something and is trying to communicate his knowledge; of this there can be no doubt.

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 that overpowers the intellect, lulling one into an intuitive state of acceptance. Fulcanelli is undoubtedly brilliant, but we are left wondering if his is the brilliance of revelation or dissimulation.

The basic premise of the book—that Gothic cathedrals are Hermetic books in stone—was an idea that made it into print in the nineteenth-century in the work of Victor Hugo. In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo spends a whole chapter (chapter 2 of book 5) 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 and 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 Myst?®re is an in-depth examination of those ‚Äúseditious pages‚Äù in stone. Fulcanelli elaborates on the symbolism of certain images found on the walls and porches of architect Guillaume of Paris‚Äôs masterpiece, Notre Dame Cathedral, and its close contemporary, Notre Dame of Amiens. To this he adds images from two houses built in the Gothic style from fifteenth-century Bourges. This guided tour of Hermetic symbolism is densely obscure, filled with ‚Äúgreen language‚Äù puns and numerous allusions. To the casual reader, and even the dedicated student, this tangled web of scholarship is daunting.

However, to the occult savants of Paris in the late 1920s, Fulcanelli‚Äôs book was almost intoxicating. Here, finally, was the word of a man who knew, the voice of the last true initiate. His student, Eug?®ne Canseliet, informs us in the preface to the first edition of Le Myst?®re that Fulcanelli had accomplished the Great Work and then disappeared from the world. ‚ÄúFor a long time now the author of this book has not been among us,‚Äù Canseliet wrote, and he was lamented by a group of ‚Äúunknown brothers who hoped to obtain from him the solution to the mysterious Verbum dimissum (missing word).

Mystification about the true identity of the alchemist obscured the fact that credible people had 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, his legend grew, fuelled by caf?© gossip and a few articles and reviews in obscure Parisian occult journals. Canseliet contributed more information: the Master had indeed accomplished transmutation, Fulcanelli hadn‚Äôt really disappeared, another book or two was planned, and so on.

After the war, Fulcanelli‚Äôs legend, and Canseliet‚Äôs career, profited from an upsurge of interest in all things metaphysical. By the mid 1950s, conditions were right to reprint both Le Myst?®re des Cath?©drales and Dwellings of the Philosphers.¬† Simply by having been the mysterious Fulcanelli‚Äôs student, Canseliet had become the grand old man of French alchemy and esotericism. But the fifties were not the twenties, and many things had changed. One of those things was the text of Le Myst?®re itself.

Original 1936 magazine article mentioning the Cross at Hendaye.

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 added to the 1957 edition of Le Myst?®re. This second edition included a new chapter entitled ‚ÄúThe Cyclic Cross of Hendaye‚Äù and a few changes in its illustrations. No mention of these changes appeared in Canseliet‚Äôs preface to the second edition.

With Canseliet’s use of everything else by Fulcanelli, 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, or 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.

The top of the Hendaye Cross.

“The Cyclic Cross at Hendaye” is the next to last, or penultimate, chapter of Fulcanelli’s masterpiece. After wading through thickets of erudition and punning slang in the rest of Le Mystere, this chapter feels awash with the bright sunlight of its Basque setting. The description of the monument and its location is seemingly clear and direct. Even the explanation of the monument’s apparent meaning is simple and virtually free of the Green Language code used throughout the rest of the book. Or so it appears on the surface…

We can date Fulcanelli’s visit to Hendaye to the early 1920s because of his comment on the “special attraction of a new beach, bristling with proud villas.” H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and the smart young London set discovered nearby St.-Jean-de-Luz in 1920 and by 1926 or so the tourist villas had spread as far south as Hendaye. Today, Hendaye-Plage, Hendaye’s beachfront addition, bustles with boutiques, dive shops and surfboard emporiums, having become a popular stop over for the young international backpack-nomad crowd.

Although Fulcanelli declares, somewhat disingenuously: “Hendaye has nothing to hold the interest of the tourist, the archaeologist or the artist,” the region does have a rather curious history. A young Louis XIV met his bride on an island in the bay below Hendaye, along the boundary between Spain and France. Wellington passed through, making nearby St.-Jean-de-Luz his base of operation against Toulouse at the close of the Napoleonic Wars. Hitler also paid a visit during World War II; in 1940 he parked his train car within walking distance of the cross at Hendaye.

“Whatever its age, the Hendaye cross shows by the decoration of its pedestal that it is the strangest monument of primitive millenarism, the rarest symbolical translation of Chilaism, which I have ever met.” Coming from Fulcanelli, this is high praise indeed. He goes on to tell us “that the unknown workman, who made these images, possessed real and profound knowledge of the universe.”

The Curch of St Vincent, Hendaye.

The Cross sits today in a very small courtyard just to the south of the church. There is a tiny garden with a park bench nearby. Standing about 12 feet tall, the Cyclic Cross at Hendaye looms over the courtyard, a mysterious apparition in the clear Basque sunlight. The monument is brown and discolored from its 300-plus years. The stone is starting to crumble and it is obvious that air pollution—the cross sits a few yards from a busy street on the main square—is speeding its dissolution. 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. Measurement reveals that it is a little taller than it is wide. On each face are curious symbols, a sun face glaring like some ancient American sun god, a strange shield-like arrangement of A’s in the arms of a cross, an eight-rayed starburst, and most curious of all, an old-fashioned man-in-the-moon face with a prominent eye. 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 sun face 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, O Crux Aves /Pes Unica, “Hail, O Cross, the Only Hope.” On the reverse side of the upper cross, above the starburst, is the Christian symbol INRI.

In “The Cyclic Cross at Hendaye” Fulcanelli gives us a guided tour of this monument to the alchemy of time. He begins with the Latin inscription, which he interprets, in French from the Latin letters of the original, as: “It is written that life takes refuge in a single space.” Following this rendering, he casually suggests that the phrase means “that a country exists, where death cannot reach man at the terrible time of the double cataclysm.” What is more, only the elite will be able to find “this promised land.”

Fulcanelli moves on to the INRI, concluding that: “…we have two symbolic crosses, both instruments of the same torture. Above is the divine cross, exemplifying the chosen means of expiation; below is the global cross, fixing the pole of the northern hemisphere and locating in time the fatal period of this expiation.” His esoteric interpretation of INRI, “by fire is nature renewed whole,” goes directly to the issue of chiliasm and a cleansing destruction as a prelude to a re-created and Edenic world. Alchemy, according to Fulcanelli’s, is the very heart of eschatology. Just as gold is refined, so will our age be refined - by fire.

Fulcanelli concludes the chapter with a series of metaphors: “The age of iron has no other seal than that of Death. Its hieroglyph is the skeleton, bearing the attributes of Saturn: the empty hourglass, symbol of time run out, and the scythe, reproduced in the figure seven, which is the number of transformation, of destruction, of annihilation,” Fulcanelli instructs us. “The Gospel of this fatal age is the one written under the inspiration of St. Matthew… It is the Gospel according to Science, the last of all but for us the first, because it teaches us that, save for a small number of the elite, we must all perish. For this reason, the angel was made the attribute of St. Matthew, because science, which alone is capable of penetrating the mystery of things, of beings and their destiny, can give man wings to raise him to knowledge of the highest truths and finally to God.”

Because Fulcanelli so openly connected alchemy and the apocalypse, the true nature of a very specific Gnostic astro-alchemical meme emerged into public consciousness. This meant that the secret was no longer contained among the elect societies. For the first time since the age of the Gothic cathedrals, the meme had broken out of its incubational structures.

In a way, the cross and its message serve as proof that there are such things as secret societies. Found throughout history, these societies preserve and present the secret of the cross in various ways. The Kabbalah in Judaism, Sufic Islam, esoteric Christianity, Gnosticism, and the Hermetic tradition have been the keepers of these ideas. The central message of the three main Western religions, that of an eschatological moment in time, is the secret that also lies at the heart of the cross at Hendaye. The meme, the ability to understand the myth and its metaphors, seems to have survived only through the actions of these secret and insular groups.

The Cross at Hendaye stands today at the southwest corner of Saint Vincent’s Church, the busiest street corner in town. No one notices the ordinary looking monument with its message of catastrophe; perhaps it was intended to be that way. The secret hides in plain sight.

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.