by Jay Weidner
At Rome, the Mother of the Gods was appropriately housed in the temple of Victoria, an echo of the shrine to Nike, victory, on Samothrace, in the 550th year after Rome’s semimythical founding. From distant Phrygia came her essence, the silver-and-black meteoric stone from the starry heavens, with a conclave of the Galli, male-born priestesses whose order had served the goddess for millennia. Rome initiated a thirteen-year construction plan to honor Cybele with a worthy temple on the Palatine Hill. From Claudia’s own lineage would come many of Rome’s greatest, as the fortunes of Hannibal, and Carthage itself, withered like a dying branch.
The temple was called the Matreum, and the worship of the new civic goddess, the Magna Mater or simply Matrona, spread rapidly throughout the Empire, blending along the way all the older forms of the Great Goddess. The stone remained in its domed temple until at least the mid-fourth century, when Julian the Apostate wrote a hymn dedicated to it and the goddess. “Who is then the Mother of the Gods? She is the source of the intellectual and creative gods, who in their turn guide the visible gods: she is both the mother and the spouse of mighty Zeus; She came into being next to and together with the great Creator; She is in control of every form of life, and the Cause of all generation; She easily brings to perfection all things that are made. Without pain She brings to birth . . . She is the Motherless Maiden, enthroned at the very side of Zeus, and in very truth is the Mother of All the Gods. . . .”21
Compare this to the anonymous fifth-century hymn to Mary: “And we will write now the praises of Our Lady, and Mother of God, the Virgin Mary. . . . Thou shalt be named the Beloved. . . . Thou art the pure chest of gold in which was laid up the manna, that bread that comes down from heaven, and the Giver of Life to all the world. . . . Thou art the treasure which Joseph purchased, and found therein the precious Pearl. . . . Thou hast become the throne of the King whom the Cherubim do bear. . . . All the kings of the earth shall come to thy light, and the people to thy brightness, O Virgin Mary.”22
Should we, then, consider the veneration of Mary as the Mother of God to be an extension of the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother? The answer seems to be yes, and Christian tradition appears to agree. After the Crucifixion, Mary was reported to have traveled to Ephesus, in Asia Minor, where she died and was buried. As we know from the Acts of the Apostles, Ephesus was the center of the cult of Artemis, the Roman Diana, as the Great Mother. After preaching against the temple, Saint Paul was accosted by a silversmith who declared: “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” Yet it is in Ephesus that Mary was first officially declared theotokos, or Mother of God, in 431 C.E.23
As the Church labored on into the Dark Ages, the ancient statutes and shrines of Our Lady were dedicated to the Virgin. The most sacred and venerated of these statues depicted the Mother Goddess as black, echoing the stone itself, and they became the Black Virgins. Their sacred sites and shrines are in the same places: springs and wells, caves on mountaintops, and grottoes of all kinds. The Black Madonna of Lyons is enshrined on a hilltop in a church built from the ruins of the former temple to Cybele, a case of direct transfer still visible to the modern tourist.24 The crypts of Notre-Dame-de-Paris and Chartres retained their Black Madonnas and shrines to Matrona. The Black Virgin of Chartres, Our Lady Underground, is still there. All of these cave sanctuaries echo the caves, grottoes, and caverns that riddle Mount Dindymus in Phrygia. The original Kabiri were cave-dwelling shaman-smiths, and Fulcanelli instructs us that “[r]eal, but occult, power . . . develops in the darkness.”25
As we researched the individuals involved in the story of the cathedrals, the Crusades, and the Templars, we discovered that they all, from Gerbert of Aurilliac to Saint Bernard, had close connections with, or were directly inspired by, the Black Madonnas. Eventually we realized that tracking the Black Madonna connections was the surest way to follow the current. The Merovingian stories of miraculous Black Madonnas arriving in self-propelled vessels seem to be directly attributable to the Cybele stone’s voyage to Rome. Even Peter the Hermit stopped at every major Black Madonna shrine in France as he preached the First Crusade (see fig. 7.6). Clermont, where Urban II announced the First Crusade, has no fewer than five ancient Black Madonnas. The one in the cathedral crypt was originally a Roman statue of Cybele of the Springs, and the cathedral itself was built over the older temple, using, as was common, its underground vaults as the foundation.26
Saint Bernard, who brought devotion to the Virgin into the religious mainstream, was inspired by a direct, and miraculously alchemical, encounter with the Virgin herself. As a youth, Bernard would spend hours in prayer before the Black Madonna of Dijon, another Roman Cybeline statue, this one with enormous breasts and a pregnant stomach. Finally reciting the Ave Maria Stellis, “Hail the Star of Mary,” before the Black Madonna one night, the Virgin appeared to him and fed him three drops of her milk. Like the drops from Ceridwen’s cauldron that gave the Celtic shaman Taliesin the understanding of the language of the birds and knowledge of all hidden things, these drops of milk transformed the young Bernard into the eloquent saint and reformer who almost single-handedly revitalized the Church.27
Figure 7.6. Map of France showing (1) Cathar sites; (2) the location of churches dedicated to Notre Dame; (3) the Black Madonna sites mentioned by Fulcanelli; and (4) other Black Madonna sites.
Fulcanelli, in section 8 of the Paris chapter of Le Mystère, gives us a list of ten prominent Black Madonnas, including two of the most famous, Notre-Dame-de-Rocamadour, “the rock beloved of the light,” and Notre-Dame-de-Puy, home of Adelmar, papal legate of the First Crusade and home to a Cybele/Mary connection with a sacred stone that dates to the first century C.E. Fulcanelli has much to say about the Black Virgin, and about her miraculous milk, as we shall see in the next chapter, but perhaps the most significant thing Fulcanelli has to impart concerning the Virgin is this: “Obviously what is dealt with here is the very essence of things . . . the Vase containing the Spirit of things: vas spirituale.”28
If we consider that, like Cybele and her stone, the Grail and the Grail Queen, and the Shekhinah, are identical, then the vessel of Our Lady, which contains the vital spirit, is the mountaintop temple, cave, or grotto. This container acts as a “house” that allows the ethereal spirit to coalesce into the physical form of the goddess. We find this in the Bahir, where in verses 4 and 5 we are told that the “house” is built by wisdom and filled with understanding, out of which flows the stream of gnosis. This is the supernal temple, and the bayit, or house, of Joseph where the Virgin dwells before giving birth to the Christ. It is formed of the sefirot Chokmah, Wisdom, and Binah, Understanding, which in turn creates the non-sefirah of Daat, or knowledge. Daat is a void or a vessel in which, when filled by mind, the animating spirit of matter, is the reflection of Kether, the Godhead, which cannot be approached while still in the body. Gnosis, knowledge, or Sophia, the light-filled void of the Buddhists, is as close to the divine as we can come.29
Understanding this allows us to grasp the meaning of the ending of Wolfram and Walter von Scharffenberg’s Tituriel. The Grail, as the essence of the Goddess, must be housed in a vessel or temple before Sophia, Gnosis, can become tangible enough to communicate her blessings, or the Christ Emmanuel, the christos within us, can be born. The Tituriel’s vision of the castle of the Grail on the Mountain of Salvation is the esoteric and inner spiritual motive behind the cathedral-building explosion. The Gothic cathedrals, it seems, were designed to house the spirit of the Great Goddess, making them living Grails that heal and transform all who enter their portals.
Everything—the structure, the colored light of the great windows, the images on the facades—was designed to accommodate this sense of wonder and gnosis. In the Gothic cathedrals, with their connection to Cybele, the Great Goddess, and the Black Madonnas, we find all the various threads of the ancient science of alchemy combined into one tangible mystereion designed to last through the ages. And the greatest of these Grail cathedrals is Notre-Dame-de-Paris, the cathedral of
the philosophers.
THE PHILOSOPHERS’ CHURCH
Among the crowd at the consecration of the abbey church of Saint-Denis on June 11, 1144, was a young Parisian student on his way up through the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Our knowledge of Maurice de Sully’s early history is sparse. Born in Sully-sur-Loire of humble parents, he apparently studied at the abbey of Fleury and came to Paris around the age of seventeen to study at the university on the Left Bank. Along with most of Paris that day, Maurice would have followed the pilgrim route of Saint Denis’s martyrdom, from the place of his torture on the eastern end of the Ile-de-la-Cité to his jail cell near what is now the flower market, and then on to climb Montmartre to the Martyrium on its height. From there it was a pleasant walk down to the abbey. Along the way, some of the pilgrims always discovered that their faith had been answered, that Saint Denis had healed them.
We can imagine the twenty-four-year-old Maurice pushing his way into the new church to catch a glimpse of the Mass of Masses, celebrated by nineteen bishops before the gilded altars. Abbot Suger himself thought that the crowd “believe[d] themselves to behold a chorus celestial rather than terrestrial, a ceremony divine rather than human.”30 It had its effect on the young cleric Maurice. In less than twenty years, Maurice de Sully would rise from obscurity to become the bishop of Paris and a confidant of kings. Along the way, he would plan a new cathedral to replace the aging churches on the Ile-de-la-Cité. The new cathedral, dedicated to Our Lady, would rise over the ruins of the ancient temples to Matrona and the Celtic Mercury, as well as Childebert I’s Merovingian cathedrals.31
When Clovis I established Paris as the center of the new Frankish Christianity, the Church still honored the traditions of its mystery-school origins by making a distinction between those who had been baptized and those who had not. The unbaptized were asked to leave before the sacrament, and so most early churches had a covered porch where the unbaptized could depart without disturbing the rest of the worshipers. In the fifth century, this practice developed into the habit of building two cathedrals, or seats of episcopal power, one for the unbaptized believers and the other for the elite, the partakers of the sacrament.32
And so Childebert I built two cathedrals on the Ile-de-la-Cité. Saint-Etienne was the larger church of the common congregation, while its companion, the smaller church of Our Lady, served the inner core of the baptized elite. Thus, from its very beginnings, Notre-Dame-de-Paris has been the initiates’ church. We might even suspect, given the altars found in the crypt in the eighteenth century, that the inner core of the Merovingian church adhered to some very peculiar concepts of Christianity, such as a devotion to a goddess figure similar to Isis. Notre Dame served as a connection point with the very ancient mysteries that Christianity was supposed to supplant.
The Merovingian Notre Dame had been destroyed by the Viking assault of 856. It was quickly rebuilt and served as a rallying point for the successful defense of 885–86. From then on, Saint-Etienne lost its stature and the episcopal seat was firmly established at Notre Dame. Unfortunately, we have no contemporary description of the Carolingian church, and not a stone remains to suggest its appearance. The site was chosen by Maurice de Sully for his new-style cathedral and stripped down to its Roman foundations, the crypts of Matrona, or Cybele.33
Planning began in 1160, as soon as Maurice was elected bishop of Paris. The visiting pope Alexander III laid the cornerstone around the spring equinox of 1163. The pope, a refugee in France from the church’s first Franco-Italian schism, publicly officiated at the consecration of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the former church of Saint Vincent and the Holy Cross. A private ceremony was held to lay the cornerstone of the new cathedral, and Bishop Maurice began to build with gusto. The choir was completed and the high altar consecrated in 1182. The patriarch of Jerusalem preached the Third Crusade from the half finished Notre-Dame-de-Paris in 1185. By the time Maurice de Sully died in 1196, the nave was done except for the roof, which was paid for in Maurice’s will.34
Work began on the western facade around the turn of the thirteenth century, and by 1220 it was finished up to the level of the Gallery of Kings. The flying buttresses were added, influenced by the newly completed cathedral at Chartres, around 1230 as the nave was reconstructed. Chapels were added between the exterior buttresses as the southern tower began to rise above the gallery. It was finished in 1240, and work shifted to the northern tower. The towers reached their present height by 1245 and the first bell, Guillaume, was installed in 1248. As soon as the reconstruction of the nave was completed in 1250, work began on the transept facades. They were finished by 1270. The next twenty years saw chapels and flying buttresses added to the choir and the chancel rebuilt. Except for the interior, major work on Notre-Dame-de-Paris ended soon after the turn of the fourteenth century.
Although construction continued for a century after his death, Maurice de Sully may be considered the guiding intelligence behind the entire project. The western facade was designed and even sculpted long before work began. Some of the sculptures were done in the 1170s, soon after construction on the cathedral started. The transept facades were designed later, but they were inspired by the same mystical vision that inspired Maurice. Although we have evidence of Templar sponsorship only for the Porch of Saint Anne, the Virgin’s mother, on the southern tower of the western facade, it seems more than coincidental that all major work on Notre Dame halted, leaving the original design unfinished, just as Philip IV suppressed the Knights Templar.35
The 150 years from the consecration of Saint-Denis to the suppression of the Templars defines the main arc of the cathedral-building movement. The impulse faded away in the fourteenth century, leaving cathedrals such as Notre Dame unfinished. The Black Death in the second half of the century seemed to accelerate the decline. The Gothic buildings of the fifteenth century are small churches, such as Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, built by Nicolas Flamel, and private homes, such as the Lallemant mansion in Bourges. Clearly, the vision went underground after the disasters of the fourteenth century.
But Notre-Dame-de-Paris remained. A history of France could be written around its rise and fall in the national consciousness. The choir screen was finished just as the Black Death swept over Europe. Paris suffered an eclipse of fortunes, as did all France, during the Hundred Years War. This struggle between Capetian France and Plantagenet England was actually backed and promoted by the opposing sides of the Templar-Zion schism. Notre-Dame-de-Paris saw the funeral of the mad king Charles VI, who in 1422 had repudiated his son in favor of the English. Nine years later, in 1431, the English king Henry VI was crowned king of France in Notre Dame Cathedral.
Unfortunately for Henry, in those nine years Joan of Arc, a vassal of René d’Anjou, had rewritten history. After her example, and the tactical skills of Duke René, lifted the siege of Orleans, Charles VII had been crowned at Rheims. In 1436, he liberated Paris from the English. For the next 346 years, a Te Deum was sung in Notre Dame on the first Friday after Easter to honor the deliverance of the capital from its English occupation. By the time Charles VII died in 1461, nothing remained of Plantagenet France except the port of Calais. His funeral, like his father’s, was held in Notre-Dame-de-Paris.
The fifteenth century continued to hold the venerable cathedral in respect, but the winds of change were blowing. It was during the lifetime of Charles VII that the word gothic was first applied to the lux continua style of Saint-Denis and Notre Dame. The Italian self-proclaimed universal genius, Leon Battista Alberti, misunderstood Abbot Suger’s reference to “goth” in its medieval sense of Jewish,36 and assumed it meant “rustic,” from the barbarian Goths who sacked Rome in 410 C.E. From this he dismissed the style, with its exuberance of forms and imagery, as a product of the fantastic tastes of the barbarians. Fulcanelli informs us that this canard has survived the centuries, even though the more exact term might be ogival for the style’s pointed arches, because it does reflect the inner meaning of the cathedral’s truth. The Gothic art of
the cathedrals is to Fulcanelli the secret language, the art of light and the art of magic that animate the dead stone of the building into a light-filled revelatory experience.
The idea of the medieval as barbaric, however, was one that was much in tune with the tenor of the Renaissance and its emphasis on classical forms. The sixteenth century saw the old cathedrals as symbols of the Church’s power and influence, and as the protest against the Church of Rome grew, the cathedrals, including Notre-Dame-de-Paris, felt the brunt of the assault. It was sacked by the Huguenots in 1548, and it was the site of the beginning of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, prompted by the marriage of Henry IV and Marguerite of Valois there in 1572.
Religious wars paralyzed France for eighty years. Louis XIII promised in 1638 to rebuild the main altar of Notre Dame if he had an heir to the throne. Later that same year, a Te Deum was sung in the old cathedral marking the birth of the future Louis XIV, the Sun King. Eventually, toward the end of his long reign, Louis would honor his father’s request and rebuild the altar. During work on the crypt in 1711, a Gallo-Roman votive pillar was found, and it is from the images on this pillar that we gain a glimpse of the spiritual antiquity of the spot.
This altar stone was the centerpiece of the Roman temple to Matrona that had occupied the space of the earlier temple to the Parcae, or weaving Fates. As such, it can be seen as a symbolic model for the cubic stone of the Great Mother. The images of Zeus, Esus, Hephaistos, and the Great Mother on the pillar suggest the local group of four Kabiri, or alchemical initiators. Hephaistos, or Vulcan, we have already mentioned as the father of the Kabiri, and Zeus is the father/son/lover of the Great Mother. Esus, usually referred to as the Celtic Hercules, is more problematic until we remember that Electra, the Samothracian priestess of the Great Goddess, was the mother of the Argive line, including Perseus and Jason. Esus then becomes the original Grail seeker, the original knight errant in search of the stone of the Goddess.37
