Vincent Bridges

Long shot establishing a vista of alpine meadow with snow capped peaks in the far background. In the middle distance is a small pagoda-like pavillion. George Harrison and Ravi Shankar play Indian flavored Grateful Dead music in the background as the camera begins to travel in toward the pavillion.

As the camera approachs the pavillion, we begin to hear a voice over the music.

Voice- (Cheerful and solemn). . . slowly, slowly, that’s good! Now feel that sensation, stay locked on your partner’s eyes and just feel. . .

The camera moves slowly up to the pagoda and we see a dozen couples, all in their mid-teens, seated in lotus posture facing each other. Their knees almost touch, but not quite. Everyone is fixed on their partner. The camera travels through the group, then focuses in on the old fat Buddha seated on a pile of cushions. He continues to talk, eyes closed and with a big smile, as the camera closes in and fades out.

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I was moved by your note to Whitley, but I don’t think he will get it. I tried to tell him something similar over dinner in Atlanta in December of ‘95. He heard me, but he didn’t grok it. He was in the process of writing his latest book — the name of which escapes me at the moment but it came out this winter - and was more interested in interpreting his own internal visions, of which I, or at least my StarGate cap, seemed to be a part, than listening to any grand unified theories. Oh well.

In many ways, Russ, you are one lucky dog. (I mean that in all senses including Gurdjieffian.) At an age when you are still young enough to enjoy it, you have stumbled on The Invisible College. You are supported in an atmosphere of synchronicity so rich as to make one wonder if it wasn’t intelligently designed. The boys out in Cosmic Coincidence Control worked overtime on this one.

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by Vincent Bridges

Mt. Everest, Chomolungma, the mother of the world.

Far away, in the shadow of the towering White Himalayas, there lies an ancient kingdom where, until recently, paganism and politics still existed in the primal balance achieved at the end of the Paleolithic golden age. In the hidden valley of Nepal, land of the three kingdoms, a living goddess controlled the relationship between governed and governor. Between the people and the king lay the land and it’s ancient personification as the goddess, whose power was loaned to the king as the right of sovereignty. And, as such, might be taken away if misused.

As modern pagans, we are all too often apolitical. We might vote for Gore because of his environmental stance, or even join Green Peace, but rarely do we see our religious beliefs as having deep political implications. But they do, and the loss of those political ramifications led to the stake and to our modern wasteland of pathological displacement.

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“Can you ever remember doing anything in the daytime?… I think the sun doesn’t exist…”

John Murdoch to Inspector Bumstead, in Dark City

Since before the beginning, over a hundred years ago, science fiction has always been the cinema’s elder brother. Perhaps because the cinema is itself such a science fictional phenomenon. Sitting in the dark with a group of strangers entranced by flickering lights and whispering non-corporeal images would have smacked of witchcraft not too many centuries ago. Now, it’s entertainment. However, the science fictional qualities of the experience remain, no matter how commonplace it has become.

The cinema began on a blustery Friday evening, December 28, 1895, in a basement room, the ‘Salon Indien’ of the Grand Cafe at 14 boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Earlier in the year, the Lumiere brothers, August and Louis, patented a projector designed to illuminate what they called “chrono-photographiques.” At first they tried to find large public venues such as the wax museum, the Musee Grevin, and then the Foiles-Bergeres, but no one seemed interested. Eventually, they rented the Salon and plastered Paris with posters advertising such amazing moving pictures as a gardener being squirted in the face, a baby playing with a ball and the arrival of a train at a station. Perhaps that’s why only about thirty people paid their franc and came in out of the cold that evening.

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Early on in my magical career, a very wise man casually told me one of the great secrets of the universe.

“Karma is what you make of it,” he said, reaching for another slice of melon and smiling broadly.

“Karma isn’t an inexorable law, immutable in its consequences and outcomes. Of course not! Where would free will, free choice, be in a world where everything you ever did had to be replayed endlessly. Bosh, you’d die of boredom before you ever understood the process.

“No, it’s more like this:

“Imagine that you are faced with a choice - any choice, doesn’t matter. Except that you know that this choice, in some unseen and completely peripheral way, will absolutely change your future, irrevocably. Now choose!

“You see, of course, that the choice is not that simple. Yet we do this every second, essentially with every choice we make, we collapse a quantum probability wave and create a new reality. And so choice can be simple observation: your eyes falling on that person, instead of that object. Heisenberg’s mathematics insist that we are not an isolated spectator of this thing we degrade by naming it ‘reality’. No, the numbers prove and events concur: we are co-creators of our own reality.

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My young friend Russell was recently asking me about the changes in brain chemistry that accompany death. He wanted to know if it could be compared to a DMT-like kundalini experience. With a sigh, I had to tell him that, while death could be the biggest DMT rush of all, for most humans it was far more likely to be a bad, out-of-focus horror movie.

Since Russell considers me somewhat of an expert on both death and neuro-chemistry, he insisted that I share my insights. Perhaps I should begin by qualifying my expert witness status.

In the spring of 1978, I participated in a clinical near-death simulation study at Duke University Medical School. I was not a researcher, I was a test subject. Along with a dozen or so other people, I was injected with a massive dose of a central nervous system depressant, (the same thing they use as part of the lethal cocktail so popular at modern executions) allowed to go almost to the point of no-return and then shot up with a saline and adrenal speedball to the heart that hauled my spirit right back from where ever it had gone. All I had to do in return for this roller-coaster ride on the astral plane was to let the lab coat gang monitor, test and interview me. I think we all got a lot out of it.

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It began the way such adventures often do these days, with a chance remark over brunch in a trendy Colorado natural food restaurant. A man named for the Greek sun god, Helios, was expounding on Eldorado, and I interjected a quote from Poe’s poem of the same name. A conversation ensued and the town of Kanopolis, Kansas, was mentioned as a point of some interest in terms of Native American prehistoric cultures. I heard the word “petroglyph” and decided then and there to stop in Kanopolis on our way back east.

Lady Sekmet and I were in Boulder, emerging spiritual center for the over-educated, self-indulgent technocrats of the new world order, attempting to organize a school for geomantic studies. Geomancy, from the Greek words for “earth divining,” is the current label for the emerging paradigm of sacred geometry based planetary bio-systems engineering. Boulder seemed receptive to our ideas and we left feeling positive, full of good vibes and pure intent.

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Like the mysterious and unending “war on terror,” the idea of a culture war has become one of those touchstones of reality in early 21st century America. Try googling the words and you get roughly half a million hits. Here’s some of my favorites:

The Catholic publishing company Fidelity Press has a magazine devoted to the Culture Wars, whose masthead announces “No social progress outside the moral order.” Run by an Ultramontanist named E. Michael Jones, it offers a comfortingly Hitlerite view of Catholicism that is actually close to the heart of the new Pope, Benedict XVI. Some examples of his rants:

“How Contraceptives Cause Drive-by Shootings. E. Michael Jones explains in a step by step narrative how the sexual revolution, conceived by foundations, taken over by the federal government, ratified by the courts, and implemented in the name of “freedom,” destroyed our cities. Freedom of this sort, to paraphrase a song, is just another word for political control. The Cultural Revolution had a secret weapon, one that was so successful, it’s been used ever since. This talk puts the connection between morals and politics into an easy to follow irrefutable argument.”

“Why the Homosexual is Our Ideal Citizen. President Clinton once told homosexual supporters he thought promotion of their lifestyle should be made mandatory in public schools. He and vice-president Gore praised Hollywood for promoting homosexuality. Why? There aren’t enough homosexual citizens to affect the voting balance. This is an attempt to turn the homosexual into the ideal citizen and a role model for us and our children. Do you know why we are all supposed to act like homosexuals even if we aren’t? This talk is crucial to those who want to understand the political meaning of homosexuality and how it is being used against the overwhelming majority of this country’s citizens.”

At Probe Ministries, Sue and Ray Bohlin are taking a high-minded perspective, with compassion for those struggling with all forms of sexual deviancy and a staunchly anti-political stance, well, sort of anyway:

“Even if abortion ended tomorrow, if every homosexual became heterosexual, and if drugs and pornography were things of the past, people without Christ would still be lost in their sins.” The main “sin” being the lack of belief in Ray and Sue’s very narrow view of religious truth.

Another article on their website, by Rick Rood, former director of publications at Probe, has this to say about Xian attitudes toward other religions:

“The only remaining option is the attitude of Christian exclusivism (sic) –the view that biblical Christianity is true, and that other religious systems are false. This is more than implied in numerous biblical statements, such as in Acts 4:12: “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved.”

“What should our attitude be toward followers of other religions? It is important for us to distinguish our attitude toward non-Christian religions from our attitude toward followers of those religions. Though we are to reject the religion, we are not to reject them by mistakenly perceiving them to be “the enemy.” The biblical injunction is to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves no matter what their religion. Rather than viewing them as “the enemy,” we should see them as “the victims” of the enemy who are in need of the same grace that has freed us from spiritual slavery–in need of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The view from the extreme right, as shown by the above selections, is that the culture war will go on until everyone, in the country and then by God???s will the entire planet, will be regimented into good, literal interpretation fundamentalists.

What did Bush say? “If you’re not with us?”

He was just being a good Xian, after all…

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.

quotes by Fredric Mistral

texts and photos by Vincent Bridges (c) 2003

“As far back as I can remember, I have in front of me a barrage of mountains whose hillocks and slopes, cliffs and narrow valleys were blue from dawn ’til dusk; a blue that varied in intensity according to the time of day. This is the chain of the Alpilles, surrounded by olive groves like some mountain of ancient Greece and a lofty keeper of legends and glory…”

“Caius Marius, the savior from Rome still popular throughout the region awaited the barbarians at the foot of this rampart, behind the walls of his camp; his trophies have been gilding under the sun of Les Antiques, near St. Remy, for two thousand years…”

“On the steep rocky cliffs of the the mountain… the princes of Les Baux built their stronghold. The gracious chatelaines held their courts of love in the fragrant vales of Les Baux… at the time of the troubadours.”

“Oh delightful fragrances! Oh light! Oh gentle nature’s peace; what longings of paradise you place in my child’s soul…”

Think of a triangle, with a town and its castle at each of the points. There’s a river on two of the three sides, but the third side drifts so openly toward the marshes of the south and the sea that the delta might as well be an island. Across the center of the triangle, almost due east to west, runs a jagged chain of sharp cliffs and steep valleys known as the Little Alps. In actuality, they look more like an Impressionist version of the mountainsides of ancient Greece, shrunken to a more human scale, and placed like a stage set in the middle of a rocky plain.

A few million years ago, the pressure from the growing Alps and the Pyrenees buckled a portion of the ancient seabed and thrust it straight up into the air. As the sea retreated, the bed on either side of the buckled rock silted up and became a stony and desert-like plain, the little Crau to the north, and the Crau to the south. The chain of limestone peaks that separates them runs roughly 20 miles, from Eyguieres, the eastern edge and the highest peak at just under 1,500 feet, to St. Gabriel in the west. At the widest point, the Alpilles are barely three miles across. Small in scale, but rich, as Frederick Mistral put it, in “legends and glory.”

The legends began six thousand years ago when the Neolithic hunters formed small communities in the safety of the mountain-top caves and springs at Les Baux and Eygaliere. Around three thousand years ago, a proto-Celtic civilization developed, one which welcomed the Greek traders who arrived half a millennium later in the 6th century BCE. Three hundred or so years later when Rome arrived in the first flush of its empire building, the Ligurians were cultured philosophers who had dwelt in peace so long they had virtually forgotten the art of war. Rome saved them from the more nomadic Celts sweeping down from the north, but at the price of their independence. The Salian confederation of Ligurian tribes was defeated by the Romans within a generation and soon thereafter the entire region was annexed as Rome’s first province, the Provincia Narbonenis. A century later, Augustus and Julius having made safe the roads back to Rome - and in doing so made Celtic Gaul Roman - the first province, Provence, became the centerpiece of the transalpine empire.

The ancient city of Glanum Livii, at the foot of its sacred mountain

Nestled in a narrow valley to the north of the Ligurians’ sacred mountain stood the ancient capital of Liguria, the Celto-Greek city of Glanon, Romanized as Glanum Livii. Founded half a millennium before the turn of the common era, Glanum’s authority depended on its closeness with the Druidic priesthood at Les Baux and in the Valley of the Ancients at Cordes. In the Roman era, it was eclipsed by Arelate (Arles), which had wisely backed Julius Caesar in his dispute with Pompey in 49 BCE. Even as Arelate grew, Glanum adhered to its old ways, absorbing first the Romans, and then in the middle of the first century CE, an influx of Jews from Palestine and other parts of the new Roman Empire. Some of these Jews were followers of a rabble-rousing magician, Jesus the Nazorean, who had just claimed the ancient throne of David in Jerusalem, and been executed for treason by the Romans for the attempted restoration of the ancient lineage. The fleeing followers included, perhaps, members of Jesus’ immediate family. As they spread throughout the region preaching their Gospel, the cultured and thoroughly Helenized Druid philosophers were also converted to the new faith. From this unique blend of spiritual influences would grow an alternative version of what, a century or two later, would be called Christianity.

The original lion guardian of the spring at Ste. Maries-de-le-Mer, circa 1st century CE

This blending of spiritual influences began when the Egyptians of the 18th and 19th Dynasties arrived, more than a millennium before Glanum was founded at the foot of its holy mountain. The Egyptians built trading forts off what was then mouth of the Rhone, near the present day Ste. Maries-de-le-Mer, and traveled up the Rhone as far as Lyons. In the Greek era, trade flowed freely from Alexandria by way of Massilia. With the trade came an influx of ideas and philosophies from the east. In the late third century BCE, Buddhist missionaries arrived, dispatched by King Asoka in India to preach the Eight-fold path to all the ends of the earth. For the next three centuries, small enclaves of Buddhist hermits could be found living in the ancient grottoes and caves of the region. Helenized statues of the Buddha have been unearthed in the caves near Lamanon, and in at least one grotto said to have been used by St. Marie Magdalene, north of Nimes. This unique overlapping of influences created the very cosmopolitan and syncretic context from which the new faith emerged, appearing suddenly and full blown with the fervor of a Jewish messianic cult, the compassionate techniques of the early Buddhists, and an emphasis on the Goddess-mother and child, that is pure paganism, recognizable all the way back to the first Neolithic hunters.

Street corner Madonna and Child, St. Remy-de-Provence

St. Remy-de-Provence, where statues of the Virgin and Child still bless every important street corner, grew from the ruins of Glanum’s destruction. Depopulated first by Diocletian’s persecution at the end of the third century CE, there was little left to sack by the time the Visigoths arrived in the early fifth century. At the turn of the sixth century, the area was revitalized and given a new name by one of those odd quirks of fate that seem to drive the history of the Dark Ages. The Visigoths made Arelate their new capital, and Alaric II proclaimed himself king of the new empire of the Goths. They were opposed only by the newly Christianized Merovingian Franks under Clovis. Declaring that it was against God’s will that the fairest portion of Gaul should be ruled by heretics and heathens, Clovis invaded the south and defeated Alaric II at the battle of Vouille. In the bargain, he became the master of southern France all the way to the Pyrenees.

The Municipal Arch at Glanum, Les Antiques

During the campaign, Clovis traveled the ancient Roman road from Arelate to Avenio (Avignon) and camped with his army in the fields north of the ruins of Glanum, around what would come to be called Les Antiques. While camped at Glanum, Clovis experienced a miraculous visitation from his mentor, St. Remy, who prophesied for Clovis the future of his dynasty -”The Kingdom of France is predestined by God for the defense of the… only true Church of Christ. This kingdom shall one day be great among the kingdoms of the earth…” - as well as his personal future - “At the end of his most glorious reign, he shall go to Jerusalem, and shall lay down his Crown and Scepter on the Mount of Olives…” Clovis was so impressed by this experience that he gave the entire area to the church of Rheims, and so the new hamlet that grew on the site was called St. Remy’s town. Clovis went on to become the greatest of the Merovingian Kings, and St. Remy-de-Provence remained ever after woven into the sacred tradition of French kingship.

Hilltop farmhouse or “mas” in Eygaliere

The fortified hilltop villages, such as Eygaliere, fared better in the next few centuries than did the new towns such as St. Remy. Hit hard by the plagues of the sixth century and the Arab invasion of the eighth, a small measure of stability returned to the region with the rise of the Carolingians. The area around St. Remy became virtually independent as a kind of Dark Age city state, and survived in this form until the rise of the Lords of les Baux in the middle of the tenth century CE. Around 950, a local nobleman named Hughes claimed by right of descent, the ancient lineage once again, the old Roman watchtower and Druidic observatory at the entrance to the Valley of the Ancients at Cordes, directly in the center of the Alpilles. Perched like a vast boat - hence the name les Baux, the beam or keel of a ship that would in local usage come to mean any sharp uprising of rock - floating to the south of the sacred mountains, the terrace has an unobstructed view of the entire southern horizon, making it possibly the most significant Neolithic and megalithic astronomical location in all of Europe. Militarily, the site commanded both the Roman road to the north, through the passes it looms above, and the east/west road across the Crau, which ran directly below the rocky fortress. Possession of this site made Hughes and his descendants the masters of the medieval empire of the sun.

Les Baux, as seen from across the Valley of the Ancients

The Lords of les Baux adopted the idea of a semi-divine lineage, proclaimed by Clovis after his vision at St. Remy, and combined it with the ancient local traditions of Druidic astronomers to produce what to their contemporaries was the odd idea that they were descended from the third wise man, Balthazar. But from within the local mythic context, this was the only description possible for a tradition that clearly preceded Christianity, even as it recognized and embraced it. Of course the Druids of the Valley of the Ancients had foreseen the new age in the sky, so why shouldn’t they have sent a wiseman, a magi, in search of the meaning of the Star? The Lords of les Baux took the mythic Star, shown with 16 rays, as their family crest.

St. Trophime, Arles

Right inside portal of St. Trophime, with Magi frieze at the top

At the height of their power and influence, the Lords of les Baux ruled roughly one hundred villages and hilltop keeps on both sides of the Alpilles and by the late twelfth century had taken on a role in international power politics. Their support encouraged Frederick I Barbarossa in his end-run around the Roman church, resulting in his 1179 coronation as King of Arles. The facade of St. Trophime in Arles, designed and sculpted for the occasion, has a frieze depicting the entire story of the Magi as a direct nod to the influence of the Lords of les Baux. It was also the time of the Troubadours, who sang at the courts of love held in Les Baux, Romanin and Roquemartine, and the Cathar heresy, which the Lords of les Baux embraced, as well as the first appearance in written form of the Kabbalah, the transcendent light mysticism of the Jews, whom the Lords of les Baux held as being under their direct protection. The troubadour cited as the source for the original Grail legend by both Chretein de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, one Guyot de Provence, was a vassal of the Lords of les Baux, and it is therefore not unusual to find images and motifs from the Grail Romances springing to mind as one contemplates the fortress of Les Baux.

Les Baux as Grail Castle

Within a generation, all would be on the verge of ruin, as first the Pope and then the French King launched crusades against the heretics of the south. After invasion and inquisition came the first waves of the Black Death, and the Lordship of les Baux passed to the Counts of Provence. In the fifteenth century, this was Good King Rene D’Anjou, who gave Les Baux to his second wife, the beloved Queen Jeanne. It is fitting that in its final days of independence, Les Baux was ruled by a Queen. After her death, King Louis XI of France destroyed the fortifications, but Les Baux continued to be an important fiefdom. In the sixteenth century, it passed to the Marechal of France, Anne de Montmorency. With the good Marechal, we arrive in the time of the region’s most famous historical figure, Michel de nostra domina, nicknamed Nostradamus by his contemporary, Francois Rabelais. The sixteenth century was a crucial point in the history of France and Europe, and Nostradamus was part of all the conspiracies and diverse intellectual currents of the era. Within his lifetime, his influence would begin to shape the events of European power politics, and after his death his shadow would continue to haunt the future, touching even our own more rational age.

The Rue Hoche, the old Jewish quarter of St. Remy-de-Provence

Michel, eldest son of Jaume de nostra domina, a local grain merchant and notary, was born in mid December 1503 in his grandmother house on the Rue Hoche, the main street of the ancient Jewish section of St. Remy-de-Provence. He spent his first fifteen years in St. Remy, playing in the shadow of Les Antiques and absorbing the region’s legends and history from his two grandfathers. At that period, Glanum was a legendary memory, but one that was accessible to the adventurous. The crypt of the small chapel of St. Jean, a few hundred yards from Les Antiques, opened on to the ancient buried temple of the Goddess of the spring, the nympheum, of Glanum. And from there, miles of underground water chambers and sewers were available, running from Glanum and the monastery of St. Paul de Mausole out to the ancient quarries and beyond. His youth in St. Remy, with its mixture of myths and ancient history, had a profound effect on the future Seer of Provence. In six quatrains of his famous Prophecies, he returned to the scenes of his youth, implying that a great secret, the local myth of the “Silver Goat,” would be discovered there one day.

The Dome of the Rock and the Palace of the Popes at Avignon from across the Rhone

At fifteen, young Michel departed for the university school at Avignon, the scene of the French Captivity of the Church in the fourteenth century and still the center of the region’s intellectual life in the sixteenth century. In September 1521, his studies interrupted by an outbreak of the plague, Michel left Avignon and began his first period of wandering. By 1529, he was in Montpelier where he applied for admission to the medical school. One of his fellow students, the already famous humanist Francois Rabelais, Latinized Michel’s surname as Nostradamus. It is not clear whether Nostradamus ever received his doctorate, but by the early 1530s he had settled in Agen, in southwestern France, in order to study with the Italian humanist Julius Ceasar Scaliger. Nostradamus married a local girl, and quickly had two children. But disaster soon struck, and both his new wife and their two children died of the plague. By 1534, Nostradamus was on the move again.

For a decade, Nostradamus wandered the south of France, from Provence to the Basque coast and Bordeaux and back again. By 1544, we find a contemporary mention of him studying the plague and its treatment with Louis Serres in Marseilles, and then, a year or so later, he was summoned to Aix and Salon to organize the fight against the plague. He was so successful that the next year he was called to Lyon for the same reason. These exploits made him well-known, and along with the division of father’s estate, he found himself wealthy enough to married the most eligible young widow in Salon-de-Provence, Anne Ponsard. But before he could settle down to wedded bliss, Nostradamus found it necessary to make a trip to Italy.

Of all of Nostradamus’ mysterious periods of wanderlust, this last journey to Italy is perhaps the most odd. He married Anne, bought and began to refurbish a house in Salon, and then left for a two-year excursion. It is hard not to consider that he was in some way summoned to Italy, or at least compelled by reasons more powerful than just gathering recipes for his book on cosmetics. His old friend Rabelais was in Italy, and may have been the source of the invitation. Nostradamus alludes in his later works to collecting a number of volumes on occult philosophy during his trip that would later serve as the source of his magickal practices. Soon after the election of Pope Julius III in 1550, Nostradamus returned to Salon-de-Provence and began the work that would make him famous for the next half a millennium.

Salon-de-Provence, Nostradamus’ home for the last decades of his life

Nostradamus was famous almost from the moment of his return, becoming a sixteenth century superstar within the decade when his prediction of Henri II’s death came true. Before his death in 1566, he was the confident of the Queen of France, and officially proclaimed the royal Councilor and Physician in Ordinary to the Crown. He charted the future of French Kings, Henri II and his sons, discovered the founder of the next dynasty, the ten-year old Henri de Bearn, recognized a future Pope, and composed a history of mankind’s possible and alternate futures in the Green Language of the Hermetic adept. And he accomplished all this without having his work placed on the newly developed Index of prohibited books, or even running afoul of the Inquisition. That alone shows that Nostradamus had many friends in powerful places.

Whatever we make of his prophecies, there can be no doubt that they have continued to fascinate us. Each era has seen the reflection of its own time and problems in Nostradamus’ enigmatic verses, but he was right enough, often enough, with his predictions that our fascination is warranted. From a historical perspective, we can see Nostradamus as part of a reformation movement, not just within the church or the state, but an attempt to chart out the reformation of the human spirit through the vehicle of time. Nostradamus saw himself in the larger tradition of the Old Testament prophets and others such as the Sybils of ancient Rome and the more recent Joachim of Flores. But, and here’s the important twist, he also saw himself as a man of the renaissance, a man of science, pragmatic and empirical. His prophetic abilities were to him a kind of future science, known to the ancients, dimly reconstructed by the scholars of his era, but surely to be perfected sometime in the long reach of human history. In that sense, we can see his Prophecies as an attempt to communicate not just across time, but across levels of awareness as well.

St. Michel-de-Apocalypse, Salon-de-Provence

The mystery of Nostradamus is ultimately the mystery of the region itself, the ancient empire of the Sun. From the Druid Seers of Les Baux, the philosophers and early Christians of Glanum, to the Merovingians origins of St. Remy, the Magi of Les Baux, the Cathars, the Kabbalah, the Templars and the legends of the Grail, Nostradamus’ vision rested on a solid basis of local myth and tradition. For example, just out Nostradamus’ back door in Salon-de-Provence, where he would have to have seen it everyday, is the Eglise St. Michel-de-Apocaylpse. On its arched tympanum we find not just St. Michel holding the sealed book of esoteric knowledge, but also posing as Ophiucus, the serpent holding esoteric 13th sign of the zodiac marking the center of the galaxy. Below his central figure is a lamb and shofar horn, the horn of judgment, beneath a Templar cross. Around these central figures are “Green” language images of the Tree of Life along with the Merovingian fleur-de-lis. Nostradamus had but to take a walk in the evening to contemplate, on one church front, the deepest core of his philosophy.

Vincent Bridges

September 28, 2003