by Jay Weidner
The conflict of the Great War had made them all equal somehow, the artists and the revolutionaries, the poets and the scientists. They mingled on the boulevards, drank and talked in the cafés and bars and bookstalls, plotted and painted late into the night in small cold-water flats in Montmartre, or danced and drank in the nightclubs and demimonde dives of the Latin Quarter. As if driven by deep-rooted survival guilt, everyone wanted to live fast, fully, and gloriously. Paris, in the postapocalyptic twenties, was the light of the world, the flash point of history. It was also the beginning of the end of time itself.2
Out of this all too brief efflorescence emerged artistic, literary, social, political, and scientific concepts that shaped much of the rest of the century. From the surrealism of André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp to the mathematics of Paul Dirac and the literary pyrotechnics of James Joyce, the idea of “transformation” bubbled just below the surface.3 It was in 1926, in the thick of this transformative ferment, that an anonymous 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 Mystère des cathédrales (The Mystery of the Cathedrals).4 The author, “Fulcanelli,” claimed that the great secret of alchemy, the queen of Western occult sciences, was plainly displayed on the walls of Paris’s own cathedral, Notre-Dame-de-Paris (see fig. 1.1).
In 1926, alchemy, by our postmodern lights a quaint and discredited Renaissance pseudoscience, was in the process of being reclaimed and reconditioned by two of the most influential movements of the century. Surrealism and psychology stumbled onto alchemy at about the same time, and each attached its 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 André 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.5
Figure 1.1. Notre-Dame-de-Paris today. (Photo by Darlene)
Fulcanelli’s book would have an indirect influence on both of these intellectual movements: indirect, because the book managed a major literary miracle—it became influential while remaining, apparently, completely unknown outside of French occult and alchemical circles. This is perhaps the strangest of all the mysteries surrounding The Mystery of the Cathedrals.
One illustration suffices to show the magnitude of the occlusion. Take any art history text on Gothic cathedrals written in the last thirty years and look at what it says about the obscure images found on the walls and entranceways of Notre-Dame. You will find, four times out of five, that alchemy is mentioned as a possible source of these vaguely Christian images. You will also find, especially if the textbook is in English, that Fulcanelli and The Mystery of the Cathedrals are neither mentioned nor given as a source.
We may call this the-dog-that-didn’t-bark-in-the-night effect. Like the dog that doesn’t make a sound while the house is robbed, Fulcanelli’s work has become conspicuous by its absence. On the other hand, the book’s widespread influence suggests an importance far beyond the antiquarian idea that the cathedrals were designed as alchemical texts. To understand the silence, we must first understand Fulcanelli.
LE MYSTÈRE DES CATHÉDRALES, ALCHEMY, AND SURREALISM
In the fall of 1925, publisher Jean Schémit received a visit from a small man dressed as a prewar bohemian, with a long Asterix-the-Gaul-style mustache. The man wanted to talk about Gothic architecture, the “green argot” of its sculptural symbols, and how slang was a kind of punning code, which he called the “language of the birds.” A few weeks later, Schémit was introduced to the man again, this time as Jean-Julien Champagne, the illustrator of a proposed book by a mysterious alchemist called Fulcanelli. Schémit 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 Saint 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.
What seems to have happened is that a young occultist upstart named Eugène Canseliet offered the publisher the manuscript of Le Mystère des cathédrales, after the mysterious visitor had cleared the way. Schémit bought it and Canseliet wrote a preface for the book in which he stated that the author, his “master” Fulcanelli, had departed this realm. He then goes on to thank Jean-Julien Champagne, the man whom Schémit thought was Fulcanelli, for the illustrations.
Champagne, a minor symbolist artist and inventor far into an absinthe-fueled decline, had gathered around him a small entourage including Canseliet. The talk centered on alchemy when they met in the small cafés of Montmartre. Champagne lived nearby, in the rue de Rochechouart, and his sixth-floor room in the crumbling Parisian tenement was often the scene of late-night symposia on all sorts of occult subjects. To his young friends, he must have seemed like a ghost from another age, with his unfashionably long hair, his riddles, and, most of all, his claim to know the secrets of alchemy.
At the time, no one else but Schémit seemed to believe that Jean-Julien Champagne was Canseliet’s master, Fulcanelli. His taste for great quantities of Pernod and absinthe indicated a man too dissipated to be as knowledgeable and erudite as the author of Le Mystère. Champagne certainly did know a real alchemist, though, whoever Fulcanelli was, and his illustrations show that he indeed had a more than passing familiarity with the alchemical art.
So we are left with the mystery of the missing master alchemist. He is a man who does not seem to exist, yet he is re-created constantly in the imagination of every seeker—a perfect foil for projection. We might even think it was all a joke, some kind of elaborate hoax, except for the material itself. When one turns to Le Mystère, one finds a witty intelligence that seems quite sure of the nature and importance of his information. This “Fulcanelli” knows something and is trying to communicate his knowledge; of this there can be no doubt.
Fulcanelli’s main strategy, the key to unraveling the mystery, lies in an understanding of what he calls the “phonetic law” of the “spoken cabala,” or the “language of the birds.” This punning, multilingual wordplay can be used to reveal unusual and, according to Fulcanelli, meaningful associations between ideas. “What unsuspected marvels we should find, if we knew how to dissect words, to strip them of their bark and liberate the spirit, the divine light which is within,” Fulcanelli writes. He claims that in our day this is the natural language of the outsiders, the outlaws and heretics at the fringes of society. (See appendix A, “Fulcanelli on the Green Language,” for the complete text of this chapter.)6
This spoken cabala was also the “green language” of the Freemasons (“All the Initiates expressed themselves in cant,” Fulcanelli reminds us) who built the art gothique of the cathedrals. “Gothic art is in fact the art got or art cot—χοτ—the art of light or of the spirit,” Fulcanelli informs us. Ultimately the “art got,” or the “art of light,” is derived from the language of the birds, which seems to be a sort of Ur-language taught by both Jesus and the ancients.
Fulcanelli also claims that Rabelais’s five-volume work Gargantua and Pantagruel is “a novel in cant,” that is, written in the secret language. Offhandedly, he also mentions Tiresias, the Greek seer who revealed to mortals the secrets of Olympus. Tiresias was taught the language of the birds by Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Just as casually, Fulcanelli notes the similarity between gothic and goetic, suggesting that Gothic art is a magic art.
From this, we see that Fulc
anelli’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 of 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 Nicolas Flamel, both are guilty of these seditious pages.”7 (See fig. 1.2.)
Essentially, Le Mystère is an in-depth examination of those “seditious pages” in stone. Fulcanelli elaborates on the symbolism of certain images found on the walls and porches of architect Guillaume of Paris’s 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 “green language” puns and numerous allusions. To the casual reader, and even the dedicated student, this tangled web of scholarship is daunting.
Figure 1.2. Symbolic knowledge displayed as ornamentation on the Gothic cathedrals, side panel from Notre-Dame-de-Paris. (Photo by Darlene)
But even after careful reading, one finds that the “mystery” of the cathedrals is never explained, and that what one assumes to be the basic mystery of alchemy is only glancingly delineated. There are allusions that escape the reader as easily as a mosquito glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. At moments, a flash of great truth may occur, giving a hint of something profound, and then, like the mosquito, it is gone. Frustrated, the reader starts over, proceeding even more carefully, following the allusions and associations, trying to find and pin down the core of meaning that he senses is there, somewhere.
All this makes Le Mystère an almost perfect surrealist text, a modern alchemical version of Lautréamont’s Chants of Maldoror, the surrealists’ favorite nineteenth-century novel. The surrealists also embraced Rabelais and understood this kind of linguistic alchemy in terms of the correspondences and connections between objects or ideas on different levels or scales of being. The classic example of this is Lautréamont’s “sudden juxtaposition on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”8
And yet, even though Fulcanelli’s basic idea—an operational and linguistic alchemy used by sages or hermetic philosophers to transform one’s perception of reality—became part of surrealism’s intellectual currency, none of the surrealists, with one exception, mentions Fulcanelli or Mystery of the Cathedrals. One of surrealism’s founding influences, Marcel Duchamp, was deeply interested in all things alchemical and was in Paris in 1926 when Le Mystère was published. Duchamp’s work touches on many themes that we shall find in Fulcanelli’s work and legend, including a fondness for puns and “green language” usages and a gender-bending sensibility that echoes the androgyny of the alchemical adept. Indeed, Duchamp’s alter ego, “Rrose Selavy,” and particularly Man Ray’s 1920 photos of Duchamp as “Selavy,” hint at Canseliet’s last encounter with Fulcanelli.9
Only Max Ernst, another surrealist influenced by alchemy, makes any allusion to Fulcanelli, and this in his Beyond Painting, published in 1936. One of Ernst’s early works, Of This Men Shall Know Nothing, painted in 1923 (see fig. 1.3), eerily echoes the symbolism on the Hendaye cross, which, as we shall see, did not become part of Fulcanelli’s Le Mystère until the second edition in 1957. The picture was dedicated to André Breton and painted with the stated intent of defining the myth of our time.
By the late 1940s, the work of the movement’s founder, André Breton—in both his book Arcana 17 and the catalogue for the 1947 surrealist exhibition—appears to be heavily influenced by Fulcanelli. Surrealism in 1947, the exhibition catalogue, is full of seemingly Fulcanelli-inspired articles such as “Liberty of Language,” by Arpad Merzei. In this article Merzei explains the “occult dialectic through linguistics.” Merzei goes on to announce that language is “really an ensemble of symbols. And this conception of language is not far off from that which existed in magical civilizations, because the interchangeability of reality and language . . . is the base and the principal key of all hermetic activity.”10
Figure 1.3. Max Ernst’s Of This Men Shall Know Nothing, 1923 (Tate Gallery, London). This intriguing painting echoes the cosmological motif found on the cross at Hendaye.
André Breton himself contributed a chart to the catalogue for Surrealism in 1947 showing personalities and their associations with the images of the Tarot cards, a continuation of the ideas that he had laid out in Arcana 17. While the Tarot is not an obvious connection to Fulcanelli and Mystery of the Cathedrals, as we shall see, Breton’s use of the Tarot as a series of alchemical metaphors suggests that he had read Fulcanelli even closer than most. Ten years later, in 1957, Breton wrote The Art of Magic, in which he insists that magic is an innate capacity of all humanity that can never be long suppressed or controlled. 11 And with that admission, surrealism takes its place alongside the literary works of Joyce, Lovecraft, and Borges as an important twentieth-century artistic addition to the Western occult tradition.12
It would seem that Fulcanelli contributed to that artistic evolution, except that the conspicuous absence of direct reference to him argues against it. Fulcanelli’s ideas seem to be present in surrealism from its inception, growing more prominent as the movement matured. Possibly one answer lies in the anonymity of Fulcanelli himself. Since “Fulcanelli” is a pseudonym, the surrealists may have absorbed his ideas from a common source, the real person behind the name. As we shall see, this is an intriguing and possibly significant clue.
Yet, even that idea fails to explain the curious reluctance of anyone, surrealist, art historian, or alchemical scholar, to address the meaning of Fulcanelli’s work. Once again, this conspicuous absence is very suggestive. Even the great American occult historian Manly P. Hall fails to mention Fulcanelli. Many scholarly books written since the 1930s about alchemy and its history fail to mention the two known books by Fulcanelli. Why?
The silence suggests a secret. The “mystery” of the cathedrals is the secret of alchemy in the sense that alchemy is an ancient initiatory science. “Fulcanelli” selected his symbolic images carefully to convey that he did indeed know the secret. Much has been made by the few occultists who have looked into Fulcanelli and his work about the difficulty of his writing. Threading a path through Fulcanelli’s labyrinth of classical allusions is daunting to all but those who enjoy sampling ancient wisdom for its own sake. Without a key, the text remains, reading after reading, incomprehensible. As in the Sufi story, however, the greatest treasure is hidden in plain sight. Fulcanelli slyly directs us with his comment on goetic or magic art: The magic, the secret, is in the art.
As with the surrealists, to the occult savants of Paris in the late 1920s, Fulcanelli’s book was almost intoxicating. Here, finally, was the word of a man who knew, the voice of the last true initiate. His student Eugène Canseliet informs us in the preface to the first edition of Le Mystère that Fulcanelli had accomplished the Great Work and then disappeared from the world. “For a long time now the author of this book has not been among us,” Canseliet wrote, and he was lamented by a group of “unknown bro
thers who hoped to obtain from him the solution to the mysterious Verbum dimissum (missing word).”13
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.14 Between 1926 and 1929, his legend grew, fueled by café gossip and a few articles and reviews in obscure Parisian occult journals. Canseliet contributed more information: The Master had indeed accomplished transmutation, Fulcanelli hadn’t really disappeared, another book or two was planned, and so on.
By 1929, when Fulcanelli’s second book, Les Demeures philosophales (Dwellings of the Philosophers),15 appeared, the world of French occultism was ready for a revelation. What it received, however, was something of a disappointment, an anticlimax. Canseliet, in his preface to this volume, gives away nothing sensational. Nothing is said about the origin of the work or its relationship to Le Mystère. The reader is left with the sense that Fulcanelli was still alive and on the scene, with only a few bare hints as to his attainments.
Dwellings of the Philosophers is an uneven work, lacking the thematic coherence and symbolic wordplay displayed in Le Mystère, despite the latter’s intentional inscrutability. Dwellings follows many of the same themes and symbolic threads as Le Mystère; in fact, there is little in it that is actually new. What Dwellings does, however, is put our understanding of alchemical adeptship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on an entirely different footing. We come to understand that “alchemy” is a deep and rich stream of tradition, but we are left questioning exactly what “alchemy” is. Fulcanelli seems to shift his focus from lab work to astral voyages to an arcane lineage of adepts. The voice that seemed to know so much in Le Mystère, although expressed with cryptic imagery and allusions, is here hesitant and unclear. Discussions begin on practical alchemy that do not lead anywhere and the passing references to the key issue of Le Mystère, the recognition of a language-like structure behind the alchemical process, only adds to the confusion.
