The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  The troubadours called their art the gaya sciencia, the “happy science,” or even “ecstatic gnosis.” Fulcanelli tells us in Le Mystère that their art was based on the green language, or the language of the birds,46 and, indeed, the troubadours took their craft seriously enough to undergo a long period of training. One of the most famous troubadour academies was at the Château Puivert, Castle of the Bold Green (fig. 6.10), where the Court of Miracles, a troubadour conclave and competition, was held. Château Puivert is in the heart of Cathar country, and from the tower of the château one can see Montségur, where the Cathars made their last stand in 1244. Château Puivert, whose seigneur, or lord, Bernard de Congost, was an ardent Cathar, stands as a literal link between the troubadours and the Cathars. When Château Puivert was razed by Simon de Montfort in 1210, Bernard fled for sanctuary to Montségur.47

  Figure 6.10. The Château Puivert, the Court of Miracles, as it is today. Sacked by Simon de Montfort in 1210, it remained, and still remains, a center of Catharism. Local neo-Cathars use the château for their devotions and pageants to the present day. (Photo by Vincent Bridges)

  Perhaps the first of the troubadours was the grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Guillaume IX, count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine. He joined the First Crusade but was never considered one of its leaders. His zeal, and respect for the Church’s authority, was lacking, and after he returned home in 1100 he became the model of the later troubadours, roaming the countryside singing of love and consorting with all manner of heretics. It is possible that Guillaume of Aquitaine picked up the new verse forms from his contacts with Arabic poetry in Outremer, and they spread by his influence to southern France. The duke led a short but merry life, and when he died in 1137, he left his immense holdings and love for poetry to his granddaughter Eleanor.48

  In many ways the most remarkable woman of the Middle Ages, Eleanor was outright sovereign of Aquitaine, the richest and fairest province of France, and very young when she was married to the king of France, the saintly Louis VII, who seems never to have known quite what to do with this powerful, beautiful, and headstrong woman. Eleanor started the fashion of the court of love, which flourished throughout Europe and reached its peak at the turn of the thirteenth century. Eleanor’s daughter, Marie de Champagne, Chrétien’s first patron, inherited her mother’s love of provençal troubadours and all the other trappings of the cult of courtly love.49

  Eleanor and her court accompanied Louis the Young on his expedition to the Holy Land, known as the disastrous and ineffectual Second Crusade. Eleanor returned from crusading and soon embarked on the great royal romance of the period. Henry Plantagenet, Henry II of England, swept her off her feet and married her with the aid of large bribes and good friends in Rome. This left the troubadour Bernard de Ventadour so heartbroken that he penned his most famous poem, the dirge to Eleanor that so moved Petrarch. Their children included two of the most renowned and infamous characters in the long panorama of English history: Richard the Lion-Hearted and King John, the signer of the Magna Carta. With such illustrious siblings as these, it is easy to lose track of a simple princess, no matter what her literary tastes. But Marie de Champagne deserves a better niche in history if only for her encouragement of poetry. She brought to her court the greatest storyteller of the age, Chrétien de Troyes

  Not much is known about Chrétien’s origins. He was born around 1130 and by 1170 he was famous as the author of a version of Ovid’s Book of Love, now lost, and a version of the Tristan story that has also disappeared. Erec et Enide was his first medieval best seller. This poem formally introduces the Matter of Britain, single-handedly created by Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1160, to the cosmopolitan audience at the court of Marie de Champagne, and from there it passed throughout the courts of Europe. Erec sets the basic pattern for all Arthurian romances, but though a Catharist perspective is displayed here, and suggested by Chrétien’s other early work, the Grail is not yet in evidence.50

  The shift to the Matter of Britain from classical subjects might be seen as a political consideration related to Eleanor’s marriage to Henry II, who was known to be obsessed with Arthurian themes. Chrétien’s early but lost work on Tristan is a clue to his Cathar leanings. Friedrich Heer, the great German authority on the culture of the Middle Ages, has suggested that the tale of Tristan and Iseult, particularly in its earliest form from the eleventh century, was a loosely disguised Cathar story. He goes on to speculate that Chrétien’s use of themes in that story, such as the contemplation of the beloved as divine, and those in Erec, argues strongly for his Cathar affiliation. According to Professor Heer, the glimpses inside the Grail Castle Chrétien gives us are actually bits of the inner traditions of the Perfecti.51

  If Chrétien, however, was already of the Catharist faith in 1170, why did a mysterious book “in the Breton tongue” given to him after 1178 by his new patron, Philip of Flanders, who appears to have had no Cathar sympathies, produce glimpses of the inner secrets of Catharism? And why was the whole symbolic complex given a Celtic gloss and its location vaguely identified with “Wales” and “Camelot” somewhere in Britain, particularly since everything else points to Provence and southern France?

  The link was obscured and overlooked until very recently. The Holy Grail was also the Precious Stone of the Wise from the Bahir, and this was hidden because the secret behind the connection is that of alchemy, knowledge more dangerous even than heresy. When we look at all the pieces of the puzzle, however, a meaningful image does appear, one that leads to the Gothic cathedrals and directly to Fulcanelli’s message in Le Mystère. In fact, the structure and authorship of the Bahir suggests a model for understanding just who Fulcanelli really was. As we shall see, the sages of the Bahir had many secrets, not the least of which was the Holy Grail.

  THE STONE OF THE WISE

  In chapter 4, we examined the Bahir, or Book of Illumination, at some length. As we saw, the Bahir combined the ideas of the work of creation, the animating of matter, with the radical concept of a celestial projection as a way to return to the divine source. Also in the Bahir, we learned that the Tree of Life, seen as an arrangement of the ten sefirot into a “tree” for the first time, is actually the “Precious Stone” whose facets are projected onto the celestial sphere. Another series of verses in the Bahir supply a mythology of the “Stone” that echoes the hidden mythos behind the Grail legends, ending with the curious statement from Genesis 49:24: “From there is the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel,” which, as we noted, sounds an oddly Christian note for a work of Hebraic mysticism.52

  The source of the ideas in the Bahir, such as the ancient astronomy of the Teli, the Cycle, and the Heart, may indeed have been Rabbi Nehuniah and the first-century Jewish Gnostic circle at Emmaus, but the text we have was compiled in Provence between 1150 and its appearance in public manuscript form in 1176, just two years before Frederick’s coronation at Arles.53 Within a decade of its appearance, Chrétien, possibly already a Cathar, had made the Grail legend into a medieval best seller. And just three years after the appearance of the Bahir, the Roman Church began its campaign of persecution against the Cathars, resulting in a full-scale crusade in 1208.

  If, from this chronology, we can speculate that the publication of the Bahir triggered both the Grail romances and the sudden rise to prominence of the Cathars, then we must ask what triggered the public appearance of the Bahir, whose secret knowledge was traditionally taught only one-on-one. Answering this question brings us back to the Templars and the secret of alchemy and the end of time. And it suggests just how these ideas came to be immortalized in stone on the facades of the Gothic cathedrals.

  The sages of the Bahir represent a secret society and a tradition that, according to Gershom Scholem, has its roots in the Hellenistic Gnosticism of first-century Jewish mysticism, and may possibly be connected through the mystic school of Emmaus with the origins of Christianity.54 The text of the Bahir as it emerged in Provence is a collection of sayings and explanations by a series of lea
rned rabbis. Some of these rabbis, such as Rabbi Nehuniah and Rabbi Akiva, are well known from the Talmud, and Rabbi Nehuniah and the school of Emmaus apparently influenced every later kabbalistic tradition. But the Bahir goes on to quote rabbis completely unknown elsewhere. There are also fables, teaching stories, and parables that have no parallel anywhere else in Hebrew literature.55

  The main rabbi quoted is one Amorai, whose name means “speaker.” Rabbi Amorai acts as the spokesman for the group, in accordance with the long-standing Hebraic tradition that the head of the group makes the pronouncements and teachings in his name or voice. Curiously enough, this is the same type of pseudonym that we find with Fulcanelli and his circle. Pierre Dujols, a prime suspect for Fulcanelli’s real identity, used the name Magaphon, or “voice of the mage,” in some of his writing.56 “Fulcanelli” itself could be this kind of group-spokesman pseudonym for a larger group of sages. Even in the text of the Bahir, the identity of the quoted sages is often obscure.

  By following those sages we can identify, we can trace a lineage from Nehuniah to the fourth-century sages Rabba and Rabbi Zeira of the Jerusalem school of alchemists and golem makers. An initial draft, called simply Raza Rabba, or “The Great Mystery,” was apparently made at this point, and was circulated thereafter in private. As late as Maimonides’ commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah in the early thirteenth century, thirty years after the appearance of the Bahir manuscript, it was completely unknown to the larger Jewish mystical community.57

  Tradition holds that a small school remained in Ono, a suburb of Jerusalem close to Mount Zion, and in Barcelona in the kingdom of Aragon, now a part of Spain but in the twelfth century part of a cultural grouping that stretched from Barcelona to Provence.58 The school in Jerusalem disappeared after the conquest of the city by the crusaders in 1099. Ideas from the Bahir appear in somewhat truncated form as a part of an eleventh-century Arabic alchemical work. This work, Mother of the King, by one Abufalah, refers to a work by King Solomon entitled HaMaspen, “The Compass” or lodestar, which suggests that it was an early version of the “Great Mystery” text of the Bahir. The anonymous Arabic author, Abufalah, a green-language pun in Arabic for “son of reason,” includes some of the HaMaspen in the Third Gate of his treatise, but the author clearly doesn’t understand it.59

  Abufalah was an Arabic Jew writing in Jerusalem between the disappearance of the mad caliph al-Hakim and the fall of the city to the crusaders. His alchemical learning is proudly displayed, but without much in the way of originality. But he does tell us where and how he learned of the mysteries. He studied with one Abu Artush, possibly of the Ono school, who, he informs us, had an ancient book that explained how Solomon learned the secret of alchemy and acquired from the queen of Sheba the precious stone with which he carried out his transmutations. In a somewhat garbled fashion, Abufalah suggests that the Egyptian queen had part of the ancient secret and possibly carried the correct lineage or bloodline, but still needed a mysterious “image of the pictures [of the heavens]” that foretold the future and brought the power of transmutation “out of the vapors” and into reality in order to complete the Great Work. This secret information King Solomon was glad to supply, Abufalah tells us.60

  Here, in the years before the fall of Jerusalem to the crusaders in 1099, we find a mysterious Arabic Jew writing about alchemy in terms of a precious stone that facilitates the transformation and of a secret text that goes back to Solomon and the foundation of the First Temple. The author lived in Jerusalem and had some connection with the local mystics studying the Raza Rabba, a transitional form of the Bahir. This might be as close as we shall come to documenting the secret of alchemy that the Templars apparently discovered in the ruins of the Temple. We would not even suspect the importance of Abufalah’s work, which exists in only one manuscript in the British Museum, except for the fact that another provençal mystic in the later Bahir tradition, Rabbi Shlomo in the thirteenth century, lifted part of it, uncredited, for his own alchemical text, the Gates of Heaven. This curious plagiarism points to an absorption of the concepts within the tradition of the Bahir and the loss of a direct contact with the original tradition caused by the fall of Jerusalem, as well as a conscious attempt to cover over the sources of the information.61

  We can think of this as a clear example of the tendency of those involved in the development of the Bahir to obscure and obfuscate their origins, identities, and sources. Like the Freemasons centuries later, our only clue is a series of metaphors involving Solomon and his Temple, including, of course, the very real and problematic Knights of the Temple of Solomon.

  The fall of Jerusalem marked the end of the early Bahir school in the suburb of Ono. Perhaps their ancient book was one of the secrets that the Templars gathered together in the early years of the twelfth century, along with some kind of “precious stone,” either the Black Stone of al-Hakim or even an earlier piece of the stone from the queen of Sheba. It is possible that it was these discoveries that were reported back to Troyes in 1104 and caused such a stir at the court of Champagne. Unraveling these secrets led to a need for the Templars in 1118 and their recognition by the pope in 1128. By 1130, when James I of Aragon gave the Templars their extensive holdings in Provence, Languedoc, and Aragon, it looked as if the Templars were about to become the new power in the land. And for almost two centuries, that’s exactly what they were.

  At the same time as the Templars rose to power, the 1120s and 1130s, the group of pre-Bahir mystics working with the “Great Mystery” text in Spain decided to relocate to Provence. By 1150, a large group of sages had settled in various locations in Provence, including Arles, Aix, and Nimes. Over the next twenty years, their teachings, added on to the basic text of the “Great Mystery,” would become the Bahir of the published manuscripts. What had been an almost lost secret tradition suddenly blossomed into a vital spiritual current that would spark the future development of both Jewish and Christian mysticism.

  This time period, from the 1130s to the 1170s, also marks the rise of the Cathars from a small Gnostic survival to a major spiritual competitor of orthodox Christianity. In 1126, two years before the pope legitimized the Templars, the Cathar heresy had had only one martyr, Peter de Bruys, in the whole of Languedoc. By 1167, just forty years later, the Cathars were extensive enough in the same region to be the majority party at the Council of Toulouse, giving their name, Albigensians, or the believers from Albi, to the entire movement.62

  Could the sudden rise of the Cathars be related to the combination of the emergence of the sages of the Bahir and the Templars, who protected the region from the full power of the Roman Church? The gathering of Jewish sages, mystics, alchemists, and even golemists, devoted to a text that is the only likely source for the discoveries on Temple Mount in Jerusalem, in the European power center of the Templars cannot be considered coincidental. Could the link between the Cathars and the Templars be the Jewish alchemists of the Bahir?

  Most scholars who note this synchronicity, from Gershom Scholem to Neil Asher Silberman, take their information on the Cathars from the Cathars’ opponents and consider that any connection between the traditions is antithetical and in the nature of a response or a reflection. This, however, doesn’t explain the admitted connection. Somehow, the traditions are related.

  The one Jewish scholar of the Bahir who took the trouble to look at what remains of the original Cathar source material, Professor Shulamit Shachar, came to a very different conclusion. Professor Shachar found that the similarities between the Bahirists and the Cathars were far more compelling than the few differences that remained when Christian hysteria was taken into account.63 While Professor Shachar didn’t draw any conclusions, there is one key point that suggests that the Cathars were directly influenced by the Bahir.

  This point is the aforementioned Shekhinah, called the Divine Presence in the Bahir and described as the light that shines even in the darkness. Her beauty is compared to that of a beautiful vessel filled with precious jewels, and her
attribute is a kind of cosmic motherlove, the ocean of wisdom. In another verse, the treasure of the Divine Presence is likened to a beautiful pearl, and through a complex series of allusions and green-language punning this is translated as “Bring to life your works in the midst of the pearl that gives rise to the years.”64

  In addition to the Shekhinah connections, the Bahir would also seem to be the source of the Cathars’ doctrine of reincarnation. In verses 194 and 195 of the Bahir, we find reincarnation described in the same terms used by the Cathars, that of vines and viticulture. Verse 196 follows this up with an account of a creation of a golem and a discussion on the Demiurge, and ends with the metaphor of the sacred marriage between the Shekhinah and the Blessed Holy One. It is with a slight shock that we realize that these three verses contain the pearl of great price, the core of the Cathar beliefs.65

  Immediately before this astonishing sequence of verses, we find a series of equal wonderment. In verses 191 through 193, the Bahir sages present us with a version of the Grail myth, one that ties together all the others and just might be the original.

  Abraham is the Grail Knight in this version, receiving from Melchizedek, the king of the righteous or consort of the Divine Presence (the Shekhinah), the command to stand watch through time and bring merit and compassion to the world. Abraham plants a tamarisk tree in Beersheba and announces the sacred word, the name of God, and then institutes the sacraments of bread and water with the words: “Whom do you serve?” These are powerful echoes of the Grail ritual, and verse 193’s “Rock of Israel” calls to mind the rock of Zion on which the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem was founded.