The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  Saint Bernard’s family connections to Zion and the Templars—his uncle André de Montbard was a founding member of the Order of Zion’s militia du Christi—are examined in chapter 5. Bernard was a devoted reformer of the Church who, it seems, wanted to institute a new kind of Christianity that appealed directly to the spirituality of the masses. At the same time that he was proposing the Templars as the model of Christian chivalry, and thereby enlisting the upper classes, he was also preaching a new theology of Mary, the mother of Christ, as the vessel by which divinity reached humanity, and thus reaching the dispossessed mass of people who still believed in the Great Mother Goddess, be she Isis or the Roman Matrona. Needless to say, this is far from biblical, in both tone and authority. The very idea of a goddess, even couched as the Mother of Christ, was slightly blasphemous.

  But after the success of Saint-Denis, and under the considerable influence of Bernard’s preaching, the new-style cathedrals would all be devoted to Our Lady, the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven. The facades of these cathedrals told the apocryphal details of her life and of those who had interacted with her in wonderfully expressive sculptures that are some of the treasures of the era (see fig. 7.4). There had been churches and even cathedrals dedicated to Our Lady before 1150, but they were few and hardly spectacular or noteworthy. After 1150, and for the next several centuries, it was, in one of a variety of forms, the most popular title for a church or cathedral in Europe. Mary, as an ideal, was the motive force behind the Gothic renaissance.

  As we have seen, veneration of Mary began as early as the first century in Provence. Saint Trophime established the first shrine to Mary the Mother of God in Arles around 46 C.E. The full flowering of Marian devotion would take another millennium to develop, until in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it inspired some of mankind’s most amazing artistic triumphs. The brief facts in the Gospels were filled in with rich details in the apocrypha of the early church. Mary is given parents, Anne and Joachim, to match the Davidic lineage of Matthew, an Immaculate Conception, and her own virgin birth.8

  Figure 7.4. Shrine to Mary at the eastern end of Notre-Dame-de-Paris. (Photo by Darlene)

  Perhaps the most curious of these early stories, and certainly the most significant from the perspective of later developments, is the tale of Mary and the Temple found in the apocryphal Book of James. There we are told that the high priest set Mary on the altar, where she danced as the Shekhinah so that all Israel might love her, and that she remained in the Temple until adulthood “as a dove and she was nourished at the hand of an angel.” The angel informed the high priest, one Zacharias, on Mary’s fourteenth birthday that it was time for her to wed, and he assembled all the eligible bachelors and widowers in Judea. The angel assured him that an unmistakable sign would allow him to choose the right man.

  Among the crowd was Joseph, a young carpenter, and he, in the quaint words of the tale, had his “rod” in his hand along with the others. When he presented his “rod” to Zacharias, a dove sprouted from it with a burst of blinding light and flew up to heaven. This was such an unmistakable sign, Mary being a dove in the Temple, that Joseph was immediately chosen. This at first scared him, as well it might, but eventually he relented and took Mary as his wife, saying: “Behold, I have taken you from the Temple of the Lord, and now I leave thee in my house.”9

  This obviously symbolic tale hides a great deal of esoteric information, but it is the next event that truly brings the whole complex of symbolism into focus. After Joseph goes back to work, Mary, echoing her modern sisters, also goes back to work in the Temple. Since she is no longer, as the dove of Shekhinah, the intermediary between the Holy of Holies and the high priest, a veil is now required. Seven holy virgins are chosen to do the work, and Mary, as the former “goddess,” is included to make eight. Hence, the eight-rayed star became sacred to Mary, who completed the veil of the Temple—the veil, of course, that is destined to be torn asunder on the death of her son.

  Mary is chosen to dye and spin the thread for the colors red and purple, the colors of royalty and sacrifice and the alpha and omega of the visible spectrum of light. As she does so, her old friend the angel of the Temple returns and tells her what the future holds, including the birth of the Son of God. She finishes her spinning and shows the cloth to the high priest who declares on sight of it that Mary will be blessed as the vessel of illumination to all future generations, the theotokos. This act of spinning connects the Virgin with Artemis/Arachne/Ariadne and the Greek Fates and the Roman Parcae, as well as with the Gallic-Celt Parsii, the benefactor goddesses of fate whose temple marked the lucky island in the Seine where Notre-Dame-de-Paris would rise over a millennium later.

  This apocryphal story has little or nothing to do with Judaism as it was practiced in the first century in Judea. The wise women of Exodus, of which one was perhaps traditionally Miriam, Moses’ sister, wove the first temple veil, not a group of virgins in the late first century B.C.E. And of course, women were never allowed in the sanctuary of the Temple. If the story has nothing to do with Judaism, then where does it come from?

  The answer is from the Egyptian Gnostic tradition, particularly such Gnostic texts as the Kore Kosmica, or “Virgin of the World,” and other Isis texts in the hermetic works of the era. The Book of James is Gnostic only by subtext, and so it survived to become part of the Catholic apocrypha, but other texts did not fare as well. But even the Book of James goes on to relate Isis to Mary by means of the miracle of the grain during the flight to Egypt. Without realizing it, perhaps, the author of the Book of James has repeated one of the oldest stories of the Egyptian delta concerning Isis, pregnant with Horus, and her pursuit by the usurping king/uncle Seth. In this version of the tale, it is Isis, using the spirit of Osiris inside her, who makes the grain grow to hide her trail.

  Fulcanelli informs us directly that the Virgin and Isis are the same symbol. “Formerly the subterranean chambers of the temples served as abodes for the statues of Isis, which at the time of the introduction of Christianity into Gaul, became those black Virgins, which the people in our day surround with a quite special veneration. Their symbolism is, moreover, identical . . .”10 A few pages further on in the same chapter, Fulcanelli casually drops the piece of the puzzle that allows the meaning of the pattern to come into focus:

  “It is a curious hermetic analogy that Cybele [just identified with Isis and Mary] was worshipped at Pessinonte in Phrygia in the form of a black stone, which was said to have fallen from heaven. Phidias represents the goddess seated on a throne between two lions, having on her head a mural crown, from which hangs a veil. Sometimes she is represented holding a key and seeming to draw back her veil. Isis, Ceres and Cybele are three heads under the same veil.”11

  Suddenly, like a clap of thunder on a clear day or a sudden flash of light in a darkened room, much that had been obscure was revealed.

  THE STONE THAT FELL FROM HEAVEN, BLACK VIRGINS, AND THE TEMPLE OF THE GRAIL

  The Anatolian highlands of central Turkey are as forbidding today as they were for the first wave of Christian crusaders in the summer of 1197. The Sangarius River cuts its way through the cliffs of soft, pinktinted stone heading northwest for the Sea of Marmara and the ancient port of Nicea, now called Busra. The Sangarius is now the Sakarya, but no matter how the place-names shift in pronunciation, the geography remains the same. The old Byzantine post road and caravan route heads southeast from Nicea along the river, running straight as an arrow until it begins to wind its way up the western edge of the central Anatolian plateau (see fig. 7.5).

  A week out of Nicea by caravan was the Byzantine garrison town of Doryleum. Perched on the edge of the plateau at the point where the river heads away from the road, it had clear strategic significance. More important to the locals for the last eight thousand or so years were the hot springs located there. Destroyed in the War for Independence between 1919 and 1922, the Old City, as its Turkish name Eskisehir proclaims, is actually today a small and bustling industri
al city. A few miles east of town along the old Byzantine road, however, the site of the crusader battle in 1197 remains virtually untouched.

  The old road climbs a steep grade between a cliff face and the drop to the river and then levels off, and the land flattens out toward a curious isolated peak forty miles away on the other side of the river. It is a lovely spot, as isolated now as it was then, and it is easy to see how the Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan picked this spot for the perfect ambush.

  The crusaders had split their forces into two sections. When the vanguard camped at dusk on June 30, 1197, the rear guard was just moving into Doryleum. Before dawn on July 1, the vanguard moved out down the valley toward the ancient road junction, watched by the sultan and his advisers from a small hill known as the Fortress of Falcon. Believing that this was the entire force of crusaders, the sultan sprang his trap.

  As the day wore on, the Turkish attacks rolled up in waves to break against the iron line of the crusading knights, inflicting a few casualties but never really threatening to break through. The Turks counted on the heat to broil alive the crusaders in their armor, and as the afternoon lengthened and the knights retreated up the valley, it appeared that the strategy would work. But just as the crusaders in the vanguard were beginning to falter, the consequences of the sultan’s error became apparent.

  The rear guard poured through the pass and smashed into the Turks in front of the Fortress of the Falcon as another force, under the papal legate the bishop of Puy, swung around the hill and fell on the rear of the Turkish forces. The sultan, knowing a defeat when one was handed to him, fled eastward toward the distant mountains. Most of the Turkish forces were killed or driven into the Sangarius, and the crusaders celebrated a great victory. A few days later they marched southeast by the middle of the three ancient roads and passed over the Taurus Mountains toward their destiny in Jerusalem,12 never knowing how close they had come to the Temple of the Grail, the original home of Wolfram’s lapsit.

  Figure 7.5. The Anatolian highlands of central Asia Minor.

  Driving eastward along the modern road to Ankara, which follows the route of the sultan’s flight, the stark and solitary mountain dominates the landscape. This is Mount Dindymus, the holy mountain of the ancient Phrygians, sacred to the mysteries of the goddess Cybele, Queen of Heaven and Mother of the Gods. On the southern slopes, a jumble of ancient and modern dwellings tumble down toward the small river Gallus, a tributary of the Sangarius. Farther up, just below the summit, a jumble of stones and walls mark the precinct of the ancient temple, looking in the afternoon sunlight like a ruined and tarnished crown.

  This ancient pile of ruins was the sanctuary of the goddess who descended to earth as a stone, a large black and silver-flecked cube of a meteorite. Caves wind from the sanctuary all the way down to the river below, and the actual mysteries were conducted in large corbel-vaulted underground chambers. On Mount Dindymus, little remains of these chambers, but at the Cybele temple in Vienne, France, we can still see the walls of its crypt and its pillars.13 These massive underground chambers would provide the foundational support, literally and figuratively, for many of the Gothic cathedrals, including Chartres, Notre-Dame-de-Paris, and Amiens, just as the myth of Cybele and her Grail stone would provide the spiritual insight and soaring imagery. And at the heart of the hermetic expression lay the ancient art and science, the threefold transmutation of alchemy.

  We’ve all heard the story. Somewhere far away in Asia Minor there was a king named Midas who wished for the power to turn ordinary objects into gold. The god Dionysus granted his wish, except that everything he touched turned to gold. Since this meant that Midas could not eat or drink, he was soon begging the god for release from his boon. Dionysus sent him to the sacred river and after washing in the water, which sparkled forever after with flecks of gold, the king was cured of the “Midas touch.” Here, in brief, is the alchemical archetype itself, the meme in mythic form.14

  The Midas of Greek legend is undoubtedly mythical, but real kings named Midas or Mitas or Mithras did indeed rule in the Anatolian highlands. While the legend is full of delightful strangeness, as we shall see, the actual history of the region is strange enough.

  The Black Sea was a wide forested valley before the Mediterranean spilled over and flooded it in the fourteenth millennium B.C.E., causing the Great Flood myths of Mesopotamia and central Asia. Along its southern edge, the mountains rise slowly to the highland plateau, from which a half dozen rivers tumble down toward the eastern end of the Black Sea. The western end is barren and rocky with only the Sangarius watershed, which empties into the Sea of Marmara. Along the upper reaches of the Sangarius, deep in the mountains and twisted rocks of the high plateau, a sophisticated culture developed around 1800 B.C.E. Called the Hittites, they ruled the region for five hundred years and made their mark on ancient history. They had a hieroglyphic form of writing and were the ancient world’s foremost metalsmiths. They worshipped the earth goddess of Old Europe, along with two consorts, the lord of the sky and the lord of the underworld.15

  Around 1200 B.C.E., the Hittites fell to the roving nomads from central Asia, the Indo-Europeans, who would eventually spread from India to Ireland. Over the next few hundred years these populations mixed and became the Phrygians of the classical era. The Phrygians still worshipped the Mother Goddess, but whether the myth changed with the arrival of the Indo-Europeans or was a remnant of the ancient beliefs is uncertain. What is clear is that the goddess got a new and resonant name: Cybele.

  The name is neither Greek nor Hittite, but is a word in the new Semitic languages pushing up from the south. It means “stone of the goddess” and comes from the same roots as Kaaba and al-Lat in Arabic. Indeed, given the similarity of names, and the cubic stone of Mecca with its original goddess worship and meteorite, the Sabeans, ancestors of the Hejaz Arabs, may have been Cybele worshippers. At any rate, as we saw in chapter 4, the idea of a stonelike throne, the Cube of Space upon which the great L in the sky of Draco sits, is not too far from Kyb-ele, or stone of the El. It is also the “Precious Stone of the Wise” from the Bahir.

  The worship of the Mother of the Gods was common to all the ancient traditions of Europe and the Middle East. The cult of Cybele, however, developed into what almost certainly was the first “mystery” school, and as such traveled from Anatolia to Rome and on to Provence. The major temples of the “mystery” of the Mother Stone of the Gods were located on the island of Samothrace, off the coast of Lydia in Asia Minor, at Memphis in Egypt, at Thebes in Greece, and at Nimes in Provence. The oldest and most important center remained at Pessinus on Mount Dindymus, where the cubic stone, the mystereion that contained the essence of the goddess, was kept.16

  Because of the fragmentation caused by time, cultures, and languages, we risk losing the larger pattern if we focus too closely on any one goddess figure or regional mystery teachings. Only by looking at all the versions of the myths and legends can we piece together anything resembling a complete picture.

  Cybele was not only mother of the gods, but also mother of humanity. In some versions, as Rhea, she mated with her father, Kronos, and begat the Titans, from whom came both the Olympian gods and mankind. The images that have survived show her on a throne, which resembles the Egyptian glyph for Isis (a throne), flanked by a pair of lions, an echo of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. In some images she is shown in a chariot drawn by a pair of lions. In her hands she holds a circular drum or tambourine and a chalice full of the elixir of life. On her head is, usually, a tower or castlelike crown from which hangs a veil.

  As Demeter, or as her daughter, Persephone, she descended into the underworld and her return was accomplished with the aid of a clan of Titans, shamans and smiths who dwelt in caves. For their help, Cybele descended to earth as a cubic stone, which she gave into their keeping as the mysterieon, or objective focus for the mystery of the cult. As the guardians of the stone, they were called Kabiri, or Kabiroi, the people of the kaba, the stone, as well as the kabiri
m, the “mighty ones” in Aramaic and Hebrew. In some myths, these Kabiri are referred to as the children of Aphrodite and Hephaistos, the god of the forge and volcanoes, the latter from the Latin form of his name, Vulcan.17

  As both Strabo and Herodotus noted, the story of the Kabiri is very close to that of the Egyptian Heru Shemsu, another group of shaman-smiths with ties to pre-catastrophe knowledge and the guardianship, at Heliopolis, of another stone from heaven, the ben-ben or phoenix stone of the sun god Re. Indeed, the relationship between Re and his “Eye,” the goddess Sekhmet or Hathor, pictured as that of father and daughter, is similar to that of Rhea and Kronos or Cybele and Zeus. Like the ben-ben at Heliopolis, the stone of the Mother Goddess was seen as the petrified sperm of the sky god.18

  The stone remained in the temple of Cybele on Mount Dindymus until the turn of the third century B.C.E. The tale of how the stone that fell from heaven became the stone of exile, to use Wolfram’s pun, was one of the grand yarns of the ancient world. In the depths of the Second Punic War, with Hannibal and his elephants rampaging at will on the Italian peninsula, the Roman senate lost faith in its gods. As they were tribal deities from Latinum and Etruscia with Greek glosses, they seemed unhelpful and insignificant in the face of the threat posed by the international power of the Carthaginians. The Roman senate decided to fall back on that “old-time religion,” the worship of the Mother of the Gods.19

  Consultation of the Sibylline Books guided the Romans to seek aid from the same Great Mother known to their reputed ancestors of Trojan fame. The Delphic oracle agreed that it was time for Cybele to come to Rome. The king of Pergamus, under whose control the temple and stone at Pessinus lay, was not so enthusiastic. It took an earthquake and a comet or a brilliant meteor shower to convince him. Accompanied by the Gallae, the priestesses of the shrine, the stone departed by ship for Rome. Miracles occurred along the way, including an interval of divine navigation and an escort of dolphins. The noblest lady of Rome, Claudia Quinta, personally welcomed the entourage of Cybele at Ostia and pulled the ship ashore when it grounded on a sandbar with her own virtuous strength, an episode considered to be another miraculous sign.20