by Jay Weidner
The critical response to Dwellings of the Philosophers was lukewarm at best. Interest waned, even when Canseliet revealed the existence of a third volume by Fulcanelli, Finis Gloria Mundi, in 1935. By 1937, Fulcanelli was a merely a legend of occult Paris in the twenties, and Canseliet had moved on to writing books on alchemy under his own name. All hope of publishing the last volume faded in the depression and crisis of the late thirties, and disappeared completely as the Nazis occupied France in the spring of 1940. Nothing is known about Canseliet’s activities during the war.
After the war, Fulcanelli’s legend, and Canseliet’s career, profited from an upsurge of interest in all things metaphysical. By the mid-1950s, conditions were right to reprint both Le Mystère des cathédrales and Dwellings of the Philosophers. Simply by having been the mysterious Fulcanelli’s 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 Mystère itself.
A NEW 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 added to the 1957 edition of Le Mystère. This second edition included 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 second 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 Luxembourg district of Paris. The critics have archly suggested that the whole venture 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.16 It must be admitted that if that were indeed the case, they failed miserably.
Any motivation for a hoax, in the ordinary sense, seems to be lacking. None of the Brotherhood, such as it was, benefited from or capitalized on the supposed Fulcanelli’s teaching, except Eugène Canseliet and possibly Jean-Julien Champagne, who illustrated both volumes. 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.
The publisher, Jean Schémit, however, assumed that “Fulcanelli” and Champagne were one and the same, and, given his meetings with Champagne and Fulcanelli, his opinion carries some weight. Certainly, if Champagne was not Fulcanelli, he was in fact his agent. Canseliet’s role seemed, to Schémit, to be more of an amanuensis or secretary. Fulcanelli dévoilé, by Geneviève Dubois, a French examination of the Fulcanelli legend published in 1993, even concludes that the work was a product of a committee with Pierre Dujols (who died in 1926, the year Le Mystère was published) supplying the scholarship, Champagne the operational skills, and Canseliet in charge of assembling the notes.17
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 Mystère? 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, as it is unlikely that he was the author of the rest of Le Mystère. In the opening paragraph of the Hendaye chapter, Fulcanelli refers to “a new beach, bristling with proud villas,” and in the next paragraph comments on the leafy trees surrounding Saint Vincent’s church on the town square. Hendaye-Plage, or beach, didn’t exist until the early 1920s, and the proud villas appeared in 1923 when the intellectuals and bohemians discovered the town. The trees around the church died in the late 1930s and were cleared away during the war. Therefore, the visit on which the Hendaye chapter is based happened between roughly 1924 and 1938.
With Canseliet’s use of everything else by Fulcanelli—or Champagne and Dujols, the “Fulcanelli” group—how are we to account for the 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 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.
So where did the chapter 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 called “The Cross of Hendaye.”18 Apparently, a painter named Lemoine took some photos of the cross while vacationing near Hendaye and showed them to a 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 (fig. 1.4).
Figure 1.4. Jules Boucher’s original article for Consolation on the Hendaye cross, 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 symbolism 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 have come only 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, the phrase is the simple O Crux Ave Spes Unica, “Hail, O Cross, the Only Hope” of thousands of cemetery monuments. But, as shown in figure 1.5, the final s of the Latin spes, or “hope,” is displaced from the first line so that the inscription reads O Crux Aves / Pes Unica. Boucher uses what he perceives to be an additional oddity in spacing to suggest that the inscription should be read phonetically in French as O Croix Have Espace Unique, or “O cross, the single pale space.”19 (See fig. 1.5.)
Figure 1.5. Top of the Hendaye cross showing the broken Latin inscription. (Photo by Darlene)
In his Hendaye chapter Fulcanelli phrased it as, “It is written that Life takes refuge in a single space.”20 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. It is unlikely that anyone stumbling on the Hendaye cross without this key piece of linguistic wordplay to guide him would ever consider trying to form French words from a strangely divided Latin phrase. But his derivation is flawed, and yields only a close approximation of Fulcanelli’s phrase. As we shall show in chapter 11 when we discuss it in detail, 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, but considering that Boucher was part of the circle, it is likely that he did. Researchers rediscovered it only long after the second edition of Le Mystère was published, and it 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 published, where did Canseliet get the new chapter? If it had been written in the mid-1920s and not used for some reason, then why the need for secrecy? And was Canseliet in on the secret? Unless we suppose
that Boucher received his information from Canseliet, which is unlikely given Canseliet’s comments on the peripheral nature of Boucher’s involvement in the group, then the mystery of the Hendaye cross was one of Fulcanelli’s most closely guarded secrets.
One possible 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.21
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.” Born in late 1899, Eugène 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 fifteen years with Fulcanelli, implying, since they seem to have met in 1915, that he last saw the Master in 1930.
From the mid-1920s until Champagne’s death in 1932, however, Canseliet lived across the hall from Champagne in a cold-water walkup in 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 Mystère 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.22
The history of alchemy is replete with complex hoaxes and mysterious adepts, and at first glance this appears to be just another of these attempts at mystification. Canseliet certainly had the most to gain from the promotion of Fulcanelli the “Master,” and is therefore the least reliable of all the witnesses. And yet his story contains important clues that do point to a possible reality for “Fulcanelli” at the core of the elaborate charade.
Therefore, let us suspend disbelief, take Eugène Canseliet’s story at face value, and see if we can find the truth of his relationship with Fulcanelli.
As noted above, Canseliet claimed to have met the group around Fulcanelli just after the war began 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. Canseliet later told Robert Amadou that Fulcanelli left Paris for the East in 1922. But the contact with Fulcanelli, whoever he was, left the Brotherhood of Heliopolis— Canseliet, Champagne, and the rest—in possession of several secrets.
These included 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.23 In a conversation with Albert Riedel (Frater Albertus of the Paracelsus Research Society), Canseliet claimed that he performed the transmutation under Fulcanelli’s direction.24 To some, this suggests that Fulcanelli was literally there in the room, demonstrating the correct 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 de Lesseps II and Pierre Curie.25 This would suggest that our supposition that Boucher had an independent contact with Fulcanelli was correct, and that 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 de Lesseps and Curie. Canseliet confirmed that they were among Fulcanelli’s large circle of friends. This, as we shall see, is possibly the most significant clue of all.
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 Second World War. Canseliet confirms this in his conversation with Frater Albertus, and implies that they are still seeking him.26 Apparently, then, Fulcanelli, on some level or other, seems have 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 Mystère at face value, that’s a pretty active record. By sifting through Canseliet’s statements, however, we can determine a sort of minimal 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 of publishing his work and teachings. Perhaps Canseliet truly meant what he said in the preface to the first edition of Le Mystère 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, after fifteen years, leaving him to his own devices. Some sort of signal was arranged, however, in case Fulcanelli ever wanted to get back in touch with Canseliet. We know this because, if Canseliet is to be believed, something of the sort apparently happened.
In 1952, after a wait of almost twenty-two years, Canseliet claimed to have met his master one last time. Before his death, Canseliet told the story, in several versions, to a number of friends and researchers.27 When he received the signal, Canseliet went to a specific city where a car met him and drove him deep into the Pyrenees. Arriving at a large château, Canseliet was greeted by his old master, Fulcanelli, now looking the same age as Canseliet himself—then in his early fifties—even though he would have been around eighty in 1930.28
From here on, Canseliet’s story becomes vague and dreamlike 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.
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 château was a refuge for advanced alchemical adepts. That evening, he saw a group of small children, dressed in sixteenth-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.29
Days passed, with Canseliet happily puttering around in his labora
tory. Fulcanelli stopped by occasionally to see how he was doing, but Canseliet is vague about their discussions. Then one morning Canseliet woke 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. The story appeared in print only after his death, in Kenneth R. Johnson’s The Fulcanelli Phenomenon, a book about which we shall have much to say later on. The end of the tale 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.”30
