The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  Sometime between 1099 and 1104, it is possible that the Order of Zion made at least two discoveries, either together or separately, in Jerusalem. The first was perhaps a text explaining the mechanics of the physics of creation and its application to the process of transmutation. The second might well have been the mad caliph’s piece of the Black Stone. Word of this discovery was sent back to France, where, upon receiving the information, Hugh of Champagne and his entourage, possibly including a few Hebrew scholars, departed immediately for Jerusalem.

  Between 1104 and 1112, the Order of Zion completed its work and perfected the process of transformation. From 1112 onward, money in great quantities flowed back to France and into the coffers of Bernard’s Cistercians. A power base was built on this wealth that forced Baldwin II to legitimize the military wing of the order to protect his throne. The Templars were formed to guard the source of this wealth, the alchemical processes that were perhaps being conducted in the cellars of the great Temple.

  While this view of events is admittedly speculative, it does have the value, as we shall see in the next chapter, of addressing some of the key images and motifs found in the Grail legends and the Bahir, which emerged in the West at the same place and at the same time. It also answers the many questions that gather around all facets of the Templars’ history. And it points up a truly curious fact. Before the Templars, alchemy was a decidedly theoretical science. After the Templars, we find documented tales of actual transmutation. The conclusion is forced upon us that something resembling our speculations must indeed have occurred.

  The Templars continued to gain power in Europe at the same time as the Cistercians were beginning their cathedral-building program. Both of these movements were financed from mysterious sources, and both had indirect and hazy connections to the Order of Our Lady of Zion. It is possible to see Saint Bernard and the Cistercians as the spiritual and social parts of a great plan to revitalize Western culture. The Templars were the political and military components of that plan, protecting the secret and its source of wealth. The cathedrals, those vast alchemical monuments in stone, were designed to facilitate the new spiritual change necessary as a prelude to the coming thousand years of peace and prosperity.

  The history of the Templars from 1128 until their demise is well documented and too familiar to need much further elaboration. By 1143, the Templars had become the exclusive military arm of the papacy, and remained a powerful force in Outremer even after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. Holy Blood, Holy Grail suggests that the Order of Zion split from the Templars at the Cutting of the Elm at Gisors in 1188, and this seems accurate given the further history of both orders. The Order of Zion, after losing its abbey on Mount Zion, seems to have moved to France, with chapters in Orleans, Bourges, Paris, and Troyes.27

  For a century after the discoveries in the Holy Land, alchemy remained the secret preserve of the initiates within the Church. The Order of Zion and the Templars seem to have had their own alchemical processes and their own individual codes for referring to them. Not until the middle of the thirteenth century did alchemy surface in a direct and unambiguous way.

  The greatest scholar of the thirteenth century, Albert the Great of Cologne, or Albertus Magnus, turned to alchemy around 1250 and produced the first original work on the subject since the late fifth century. His treatise On Alchemy champions alchemy as a difficult but true art. He does not tell us if he actually made gold, but his directions to the practitioner indicate not only knowledge of the triple nature of alchemy, but also an awareness of the changes in the political winds. He warns the alchemist to choose the right hour for his operations, to be patient and diligent in his prayers and exhortations, to operate by the rules (here Albert gives us the necessary steps: trituration, sublimation, fixation, calcination, solution, distillation, and coagulation, seven in all), and always to avoid contact with princes and rulers.28

  Albert was also reputed to have had a fortune-telling “head” and seems by contemporary accounts to have been an adept of the Hebraic work of creation. We are told that he had constructed an artificial man, a golem, endowed with the ability to speak but not to reason. The golem’s inane chattering so disturbed Albert’s pupil, the future saint Thomas of Aquinas, that Albert finally had to destroy it. Another interesting alchemical story, related by William II, count of Holland, has Albert setting a feast in the frozen and snow-covered garden of the monastery, only to have it magically become summer, with birds, butterflies, and blossoming trees, as the diners sat down to their meal.29

  Intriguing as these suggestions are, it was not the aristocratic Albert the Great who brought alchemy firmly into the mainstream of medieval thought, but rather the humble scholar Arnold of Villanova. Arnold was born in Valencia about the time that Notre-Dame-de-Paris was finished. He gained his initial fame as a physician and could be called the first psychologist, having written a surprisingly modern work on the interpretation of dreams. Although seemingly not a member of any monastic or clerical order, Arnold conducted secret missions for kings, emperors, and popes alike.30

  In his works, Arnold emphasized the reality of alchemical transformation. To demonstrate this, he performed a transmutation in front of Pope Boniface VIII. It was successful, the first documented account of such a transmutation. A witness, John Andre, the major domo of the Papal Curia, reports that Arnold “submitted the gold sticks he produced to everyone for examination.”31 This is very significant for the simple reason that since the second century, no one, no matter how much he seemed to know about alchemy, had actually done the transmutation in front of witnesses. Arnold’s performance in front of Boniface was the turning point in alchemical history. Unfortunately, it was also the beginning of the end for the Templars and, in a lesser way, for the Order of Zion.

  One of those observing Arnold’s transmutation was the future pope Clement V. Bertrand de Got, the former archbishop of Bordeaux, became the first pope of the so-called French captivity after the strife caused by Boniface VIII’s assertion of absolute papal rights. The king of France, asserting a higher spiritual and political authority than the pope, swooped down on Rome and literally captured the Church. Eleven months later, Bertrand, a Frenchman, was finally elected as Clement V. Arnold, unfortunately, had been in the thick of the political infighting.32

  Philip, the French king, used his power over the pope to recall Boniface’s proclamation. And then the king set in motion an idea that had been stirring in his brain since Arnold’s demonstration. The king called a general council and proscribed the Templars. Pope Clement V, wanting his piece of the vast Templar wealth, went along with Philip, even though he knew the charges against the Templars were basically groundless. The Templars thus ran afoul of a greedy French king and his puppet of a pope and were persecuted as heretics. Just as the missing link in the Templars’ origin appears to be alchemy, so does it appear that their downfall was also caused by alchemy.

  The Grail romances provide us with direct connections to the Templars as guardians of the secret, as well as glimpses of the “miraculous stone” at the heart of the mystery and a general tone of transformation and transmutation as a subtext. The sudden emergence of the long secret “illumination” sect, the sages of the Bahir, in a public form in the West, supplies us with the missing philosophical and kabbalistic clue needed to see the larger pattern of what might be called astro-alchemy, which, as Fulcanelli informs us, was in turn memorialized in the Gothic cathedrals.

  During the height of their influence, from 1150 to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, three different facets of the alchemical secret surfaced in the West and produced a kind of Gothic renaissance. In this emergence, the book and stone of the Templars and the Grail romances became the book in stone of the Gothic cathedrals. Behind this transformation is the theology of Light as expressed in the Bahir and made real in the lux continua architectural style of the new cathedrals.

  By the time Notre-Dame-de-Paris’ external decorations—including the magnificent bas
-relief rendition of Alchemy itself on the Great Porch—were finished in 1235, the need for subterfuge was thought to have passed. The imperial and orthodox Church of Rome was in ascendancy, with both the Templars and the Order of Zion chastised by the crusade against the Cathars, and struggling to find a new mission. Power politics had also stabilized, somewhat, with the Holy Roman Empire as top dog of the feudal pack. The Middle Ages were reaching for their apogee, while falling, at the same time, far short of the glorious millennial visions of Sylvester II and the pilgrim-warriors of the First Crusade. Little did either the sponsors of these great works or the guilds that created them realize that within a hundred years this renaissance would end in death, betrayal, wars, and natural disasters that would plunge Europe back into a mini-version of the Dark Ages. As Europe recovered from this disaster in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the flowering of the earlier Gothic renaissance was forgotten and diminished.

  Without the background these clues provide, understanding Fulcanelli’s message in Le Mystère is almost impossible. Therefore, before we turn to Fulcanelli himself, let us examine how the light of the Grail transformed into the continuous light of the great Gothic cathedrals, and in so doing brought the light of alchemy to center stage in world politics and caused the downfall of the Knights of the Temple, which once again forced the alchemical tradition underground.

  SIX

  GRAIL KNIGHTS, PERFECTI, AND THE ILLUMINATED SAGES OF PROVENCE

  THE HERMETIC GRAIL

  In the early 1180s, as the shadow of Saladin lengthened over the Holy Land, a nobleman with Merovingian ancestry, Philip d’Alsace, count of Flanders, commissioned the greatest poet of the age, Chrétien de Troyes, to do a French reworking of a strange tale about a poor knight, the son of a widow, who attains the kingship of the Holy Grail. Philip supposedly found the tale in an ancient Celtic chronicle, and wanted Chrétien, the medieval version of a best-selling author, to make it a hit. Chrétien labored over this strange story, sometimes giving its symbolic events a sort of numinous and dreamlike quality and at other times obviously failing to grasp the importance and even the meaning of his source material.1

  Nonetheless, as Jerusalem fell and the Christian kingdoms of Outremer shrank to a few coastal enclaves, poets in noble courts across Europe took up the story of Chrétien’s Grail. Chrétien himself never completed his work, leaving the long poem unfinished at his death. Several poets tried to continue the story, with varying degrees of success. Even more important, other writers took up the theme, as if from a common source, and expanded upon it.

  Robert de Boron, writing between 1190 and 1199,2 Christianized the Grail story. He tells us that the source of his story, in its Christian form, is a great book, the secrets of which have been revealed to him. Robert, unlike Chrétien, is quite sure what the Grail is all about. The Grail is the cup of the Last Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea collected Jesus’ blood at the Crucifixion. After the Crucifixion, Joseph’s family became the keepers of the Grail. The adventures of the Grail romances involve the members of this family, and in the end the Grail comes to England with Joseph’s brother-in-law, Brons the Fisher-King. As in Chrétien’s version, Perceval is called “the Son of the Widow Lady,” but Robert also describes him as a descendant of Joseph of Arimathea.

  We must keep in mind that at this same period, the Order of Our Lady of Zion was in the process of relocating its power base to Europe. Supported by the powerful Cistercians, by 1178, ten years before the schism between the Templars and the older order, Zion was well established in Europe. A papal bull from Alexander III grants the order possession of chapters in Picardy, France, Lombardy, Calabria, Sicily, Spain, and the Holy Lands.3 After the loss of Jerusalem, the Order cut loose the Templars and embarked on a new program. The Grail romances can be seen as part of this new plan.

  The histories collected through two centuries of patient work by Sylvester’s chroniclers suddenly appeared as the content of a new kind of popular mythology, one nicely geared to the knightly aspirations of the crusading era. The source, as both Chrétien and Robert de Boron inform us, is a secret book in the possession of certain nobles connected with the Merovingians and the Order of Zion.

  Another Grail romance, composed at the same time and from the same sources as Robert’s History of the Grail, makes this connection even more apparent. The anonymous author of the Perlesvaus may have used the same sources as Robert (he agrees with him, for instance, on Perceval’s lineage), but his mystical spin on the story puts it in a league by itself.

  The author may have been a member of the Order of Zion, which would account for his anonymity. He certainly had a vast command of the Arthurian literature of his day and possibly even access to the order’s Merovingian research. Unlike Robert de Boron, who thought the Grail events happened in the first century after Christ’s death, the anonymous author of the Perlesvaus clearly dates the events in his story to the late fifth century, the time of both the historical King Arthur and the rise of the Merovingian dynasty.4

  Another romance, The Quest for the Holy Grail, written around the turn of the thirteenth century by a group of Cistercian monks as part of the so-called Vulgate Cycle of Grail romances, gives a precise date for the events it records: 454 years after the death of Jesus on the cross, or 487 C.E., the first flush of the Merovingian dynasty and just a few years before Clovis’s conversion by Saint Remy and his pact with the Western Church.5

  From these details alone, the hand of the Order of Our Lady of Zion and its chronicling predecessors can clearly be discerned in the creation and popularity of the Grail romances. But the Perlesvaus goes further by describing the keepers of the Grail’s secrets in terms that any contemporary would immediately interpret as referring to the Templars. The castle of the Grail, we are told, houses a conclave of initiates dressed in white robes with red crosses emblazoned on their breasts.

  The Perlesvaus is full of strange alchemical details that suggest its author’s familiarity with the Kabbalah of the Bahir. The clearest example of this, and the most cogent to our investigation, is Perlesvaus’ voyage to the Isle of Blessed Elders in the closing pages of the romance. In this otherworldly Paradise, Perlesvaus finds a magnificent Tree with a fountain flowing out from it surrounded by twelve golden pillars. This axis mundi motif is a junction point between the Bahir, which introduced the concept of the Tree of Life to the Kabbalah, and later alchemical symbolism concerned with the timing of alchemical operations. In much of the Perlesvaus, alchemy seems to lurk just below the surface, even in the Grail itself. To Perlesvaus, the Grail appeared as a complex and evolving series of five images, the last of which was the Grail cup.

  The most significant of all the Grail romances is the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, written between 1200 and 1215.6 Wolfram minces no words in calling the keepers of the Grail Templars, and then goes to the heart of the mystery by describing the Grail as a miraculous stone. This “lapsit exillis,” a green-language pun that suggests the exiled stone of Matthew, as well as the stone that fell from heaven and even the “lapsit elixir” of the alchemical philosopher’s stone, has miraculous powers, including healing, nourishment, and the ability to communicate its wishes.7

  Wolfram claimed to have learned his tale from one Guyot, or Kyot, of Provence, who in turn learned it from a recovered manuscript from Toledo, in Muslim Spain. This source, according to Wolfram, is the manuscript of Flegetanis, a heathen astronomer living roughly at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, or about 1,200 years before the birth of Christ. Flegetanis, whose name is simply the Persian phrase “familiar with the stars,” claimed to read the “name” of the Grail in the stars and thereby understood the workings of destiny. He also claimed that this astral destiny focused on the family of Christ and his descendants. Guyot augmented this tale with his own Latin research, suggesting that either he was, or had access to, one of Sylvester II’s Chroniclers, before he passed it on to Wolfram.

  Parzival is a masterpiece of alchemical literature, and a
s such is worthy of another volume at least the size of this one in order to do it justice.8 For our purposes, let us simply note that in addition to the direct reference to the Templars and the meteoric stone that fell from heaven, Parzival ends by informing us that Lohengrin, the Swan Knight of Lorraine, is the great-grandfather of Godfroi de Bouillon. With Parzival, the origins of the First Crusade and its alchemical secrets come full circle as a Grail romance. A mysterious text and an artifact, the miraculous stone, the “lapsit exillis” in the hands of a family group of knights that spans both East and West and sounds a lot like the contemporary Templars, should have been a fairly obvious series of references to those in the know at the turn of the thirteenth century. And behind all the legends lurk the Order of Zion and its predecessors, Sylvester’s Chroniclers.

  After 1210, as the persecution of Cathar heretics in the south of France increased into a crusade, the Grail romances began to fade from favor. The Church never challenged them directly, which is indeed curious, but by the middle of the thirteenth century, their imagery and symbolism had faded from literature and politics, only to be permanently engraved in stone on the porches and naves of the newly constructed Gothic cathedrals. Indeed, one of the magnificent Gothic statues at Chartres Cathedral depicts Melchizedek, the king of Ur and Salem who converted Abraham to monotheism, holding the chalice of the Grail. This symbolic image suggests that a deep understanding of the Grail legend remained, at least among the builders of the church itself.

  The flash point where people and events and traditions transformed into the Grail of romance and legend can be found in the south of France, in that favored province of Rome, Provence, where the Holy Family supposedly emigrated from Palestine within a few years of the Crucifixion. It is here, the home of the mysterious Guyot who wrote the original source tale, where we find Mary Magdalene, holy trophies, and miraculous stones at the core of the earliest community of “Christians” in Europe. And it is here, in Provence, that all the threads of this complex tapestry converge into one single event, the coronation of Frederick I Barbarossa as king of Arles in 1178.