by Jay Weidner
So far in this first chapter, Fulcanelli sounds a little old-fashioned, a product of Hugo-esque Gothic romanticism from the mid-nineteenth century. To his readers in 1926, this would have sounded quaint, even comfortingly antiquarian. Fulcanelli continues to play on this assumption on the part of his readers, and even references the classic scene in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, by shifting his focus to the Feast of Fools.
Here for the first time we encounter Fulcanelli’s chief literary device, the use of italicized words and phrases to create a “hidden” metatext that can be read independently of the rest of the words on the page. As an example of this, let’s look at just the emphasized words and phrases in the last three paragraphs of section 1 of the “Le Mystère” chapter:
Feast of Fools . . . disguised Science . . . triumphal chariot of Bacchus . . . Feast of the Donkey . . . Master Aliboron . . . this asinine power, which was worth to the Church the gold of Arabia, the incense and the myrrh of the land of Saba . . . mystifiers of the land of Saba or Caba . . . image-makers . . . Procession of the Fox . . . Feast of the Donkey . . . Flagellation of the Alleluia . . . sabots . . . procession of the Shrovetide Carnival . . . Devilry of Chaumont . . . Infanterie dijonnaise . . . Mad Mother . . . their buttocks . . . Ball Game . . .
If we cannot solve Fulcanelli’s first symbolic conundrum, then we haven’t much hope of interpreting the rest of the book. Indeed, if we can assume that he is playing fair with us, then an important, perhaps crucial key should lie in this initial group of emphasized words and phrases. So how do we read it?
The first point that jumps out is that Fulcanelli is drawing our attention to two seasonal church festivals that are similar in tone and very pagan in origin. The first, the Feast of Fools, now familiar to millions from the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, seems to have been a holdover from the Roman Saturnalia. In the Middle Ages it was celebrated as part of the Twelve Nights of Christmas, usually related to the Feast of the Epiphany. As this is the date given in Hugo, we may assume that it is the connection Fulcanelli is drawing for us.4
The second, the Feast of the Donkey, is part of the Easter celebration and traditionally marked the spring equinox or the Annunciation of the Virgin, Christ’s conception day. Associated, broadly, with the ass that Jesus rode into Jerusalem during his proclamation as a descendant of David, and with the prophetic ass of Balaam who declared that of this lineage, David’s, a messiah would come, the Feast of the Donkey, as Fulcanelli suggests, has much more ancient alchemical roots. Fulcanelli’s metatext message points to the “image-makers,” the “mystifiers of the land of Saba,” who are by the implication of their gifts, gold, incense, and myrrh, the Magi.
Fulcanelli then mentions a collection of hermetic holdovers, with “the Gothic church as their theatre,” that includes spinning tops, ball games, and other such apparently profane and bawdy activities. He connects them to various Shrovetide or pre-Lenten carnivals, and suggests that these are the last vestiges of the ancient semipagan feasts.
If we read these three paragraphs without focusing on the italicized words, we have a sense that they are meant to inform us of certain pagan traditions connected with the cathedrals, but exactly what these are and what they mean remains elusive. We can read these paragraphs hundreds of times, and be fairly comfortable in our interpretation of their meaning, and yet miss the essential message if we do not look deeply and carefully into the references contained in those emphasized words and phrases. This is what makes Le Mystère an initiatory text, a true alchemical document and the “guidebook” to the hermetic quest for the Grail Stone of the Wise, and which marks Fulcanelli as the last great master of the green language.
SOLVING THE CONUNDRUM
How do we unravel Fulcanelli’s first conundrum? We start by looking at the significance of the one solid date given us, January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany. To the early Church, the Feast of the Epiphany, which marked the arrival of the Magi, the marriage at Cana, and the baptism of Jesus by John, was much more important than Jesus’ nativity. For some sections of the Christian community, such as the Cathars, the Epiphany was the most significant moment in the Church calendar. Some obscure secret seemed to hide behind the juxtaposition of these three events, a secret that threatened to change the very concept of Christianity as taught by the official church.5
In this conjunction of symbols, we find a cluster of very revealing clues. There is a sexual component in the marriage at Cana, supposedly the Holy Couple’s wedding night, as well as in John the Baptist’s acknowledgment of Jesus as his son during the baptism. The visit of the Magi is a symbol of the larger spiritual current and a nod to the original illuminated ones. The Epiphany symbolizes a much older tradition than its Christian gloss, and as such was very disturbing to the Church, which retaliated by shifting the focus to Christ’s nativity.
There is no biblical basis for the date of the Nativity, and what Gospel evidence there is suggests Jesus was born in the late fall, not in midwinter. The early Church had no traditions or celebrations of the Nativity until the third century, and such celebrations didn’t become common until the fourth century. It wasn’t until the fifth century that the date officially became December 25, which was chosen for reasons of religious politics, not any sense of spiritual or historical correctness. The act of saying a mass in honor of Jesus’ birth, hence “Christ’s mass,” or Christmas, on the birthday of his most powerful pagan rival, Mithras, was plainly and simply an attempt to absorb and redirect the rival cult’s followers, in effect saying that Christ is more powerful than Mithras because he supersedes him. It also undercut the importance of the Epiphany, including the Magi as an afterthought to the Nativity instead of as the focus of the story.6
But the Feast of the Epiphany remained a popular semipagan festival. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Feast of Fools was revived and swiftly it became a kind of alternative religious expression. The first “guilds,” or organized brotherhoods of free tradesmen, developed as sponsors and promoters of the festivities. Within these guilds were many heretical ideas, some of which would surface centuries later as part of Freemasonry. The Church, of course, saw these pageant guilds as little more than secret conclaves of unrepentant pagans and heretics and did its best to restrain them.
The Feast of Fools was connected to the Epiphany through an earlier Feast of the Donkey, or Ass. Held originally between January 14 and January 17, this festival honored the ass Mary rode to Bethlehem, and which stood by at the manger, as well the ass she rode on the flight into Egypt. This ass was also combined with the ass on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem, and with the prophetic ass of Balaam from the Old Testament. In the oldest forms of this pageant, the King of Fools appears as King Balaak, who summons forth the prophetic ass. As the Feast of the Donkey shifted to the pre-Lenten carnival period, the King of the Asses, or the King of Fools, was grafted on the survivals of Saturnalia and settled on the Epiphany. This shift, at the height of the Cathar heresy and the cathedral-building boom, suggests that the influences at work within the Church were no longer completely orthodox.
This festival, or “hermetic fair,” signified, in its total reversal of churchly authority, subjecting the “ignorant clergy to the authority of the disguised Science,” the hidden and “undeniable superiority” of an even more ancient spiritual current. This “gothic” spirituality was symbolized by the King of the Wise Fools, whose coronation on the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrating the tangible evidence of Jesus’ Messiah-hood, his acclaim by the Magi, his baptism, and his first miracle, made the point of his precedence and authority even clearer. This is the original Great King of the Jews, the one whose line Jesus was merely restoring, Solomon the Wise, builder of the First Temple.
Fulcanelli points us in that direction with his curious mentions of the land of Saba or Caba and its mystifiers and image-makers. The land of Saba is, of course, Arabia and the eastern portion of the Horn of Africa, Eritrea and Ethiopia, home of the Sabeans, ancestor
s of the Arabs and the original builders of the Kaaba, the holy cube at Mecca, as we saw in chapter 4. The Sabeans were probably worshippers of a mother goddess along the lines of Cybele in Phrygia, whose name may in fact have been adopted from the Sabean original. The Caba of El, Cybele, is certainly the concept behind the sacred stone of Mecca, seen originally as the vulva of the Mother Goddess Allat (or al-Lat), and throne of her son, the El in the sky, or Allah. Saba is also the home of the queen of Sheba, the original perhaps of the Black Madonnas. And it is this reference that Fulcanelli wishes us to see in his curious metatext clues.
Following his thread of clues, we come to a single original source, one that we have discussed in chapter 6, an eleventh-century Arabic alchemical work entitled Mother of the King, by one Abufalah, or the “Son of Reason.” As noted already, this work entered the later Bahir tradition in the thirteenth century through Rabbi Shlomo, who lifted part of it, uncredited, for his own alchemical text, the Gates of Heaven. Abufalah’s reference to King Solomon’s book HaMaspen, suggests that it was an early version of the “Great Mystery” text of the Bahir. In this work, according to Abufalah, Solomon relates how he learned the secret of alchemy from the queen of Sheba, or Saba.7
As if referencing this obscure text, which stands at the juncture point of all the traditions and currents we have been examining, from the Bahir to the Cathars, from the Templars to the Grail romances, were not enough, Fulcanelli’s metatext clues also direct us to an even more obscure work in the golem tradition that spun off from the Bahir and the Sefer Yetzirah. His comments on image-makers and mystifiers echo portions of the anonymous twelfth-century work Sefer ha-Chaim, or the Book of Life. Written around 1200, contemporaneous with Robert de Boron’s Grail romances, this curious work directly connects the golem tradition of animating matter with the main current of Jewish alchemy in the Bahir.8
In this work, we are told that the secret of animating matter concerns the alignment of the merkabah, the triumphant chariot, and the appropriate constellation. Dust is gathered from this alignment and is then used by “all the witches and magicians of Egypt” to animate statues. This was, in fact, we are informed, the method used by Aaron to animate the golden calf while Moses was busy on Mount Sinai, and the technique was still used in India and Arabia, according to the anonymous author. This work is also unique in that it represents an older form of golem making that does not directly relate to the methods described in the Sefer Yetzirah. This older form is related, by way of Rabbi Shlomo and the other provençal kabbalists, to the alchemical and eschatological implications of the Bahir. The Sefer ha-Chaim seems to be the one remaining manuscript in which these connections can be found.
Fulcanelli goes further, however, by emphasizing the word sabot as a spinning top, the Hebrew dreidel. This spinning refers to the whirlwind of the mystical experience, and the spinning of the celestial mill as the movement of the sky grinds out time. As we saw in chapter 4, this concept is an important one in the Bahir. Fulcanelli’s insistence on connecting these metaphors with the Feast of the Epiphany forces us to consider the significance of that moment in time. Is there an astronomical and eschatological clue here as well?
Indeed there is, but we must step back again to see it. Fulcanelli draws our attention to the vernal equinox, the point from which we measure the precessional age. The vernal equinox is now moving from Pisces to Aquarius, as a little more than two thousand years ago it moved from Aries to Pisces. In the medieval text The Mother of the King, which Fulcanelli is citing, we are told of a mysterious image that could foretell the future that was required before the Stone of the Wise could be used for transmutation. This “image” could be a blueprint of the precessional process showing the merkabah points, the celestial alignments, from the Sefer ha-Chaim. But why the insistence on the Epiphany? Could there be something marked by that date, January 6, that has a significance in the larger pattern of precessional mythology?
In the second and third centuries B.C.E., the vernal equinox fell on the cusp of Aries/Pisces and the winter solstice fell on the cusp of Capricorn/Sagittarius. A thousand years later, due to precession, the winter solstice fell in the middle of Sagittarius. As it is now, another thousand or so years later, it falls on the cusp of Sagittarius/Scorpio. January 6 is fifteen days after the winter solstice, and around 1100 fell on the former winter solstice point, the cusp of Capricorn/Sagittarius. The Feast of the Epiphany is then marking the same precessional era, the “age” noted by the vernal equinox in Aries/Pisces, except that its rise to prominence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries seemed to be marking more than just the original winter solstice point. We can also see it as a way of counting down to the arrival of the next precessional age, with the vernal equinox on Pisces/Aquarius.
The millennial notions of the era seemed to have been sparked by noting this significant point. When the cusp moved across the Epiphany, as happened in the twelfth century, a crop of new millennial prophecies emerged both in the Jewish kabbalistic groups and in the Christian communities. Both the Elijah the Prophet visits that sparked the publication of the Bahir, and the prophecies of Joachim of Flores are connected to this secret event. Joachim, in fact, dated the beginning of the third segment of this zodiacal age to 1260, which is just a little over ten degrees of precession from the next cusp/winter-solstice alignment, which is currently in progress. The sudden and almost desperate boom in cathedral building appears designed to climax at the end and beginning point of Joachim’s ages, 1260. Certainly, in the case of the almost incredible twenty-six-year rebuilding of Chartres Cathedral, some prominent but unspoken deadline forced the completion of the work. The cathedrals of Our Lady, perhaps, were intended to house the spirit of the new age, the age of the Holy Spirit according to Joachim of Flores.
Fulcanelli, then, in his very first metatext conundrum, supplies us with all the clues required to solve the mystery of the cathedrals. But to uncover that secret, to find the disguised science hidden in the cathedrals, requires an intellectual quest of the highest order. Fulcanelli plays fair, and gives us at the very beginning all the clues we shall need to interpret the hidden message. But we must do our part of the work, and carefully follow those clues.
SAINT MARCEL’S DRAGON
Fulcanelli’s initial riddle supplies us with a vast amount of information, connotations, and connections when we unravel it. However, the dragon-axis component of the Teli as described in the Bahir is missing from the riddle. The element of eschatological timing is referenced in the connection to the “image” that foretold the future in Abufalah’s tale of Solomon and Sheba, and the hidden impact of the original winter-solstice point crossing the Epiphany is clearly a factor in the sudden rise of cathedral building. But so far, no dragons.
For that we must wait until section 6 of Fulcanelli’s “Paris” chapter. This section is devoted entirely to one image, the dragon and plinth of Saint Marcel on the middle pillar of the Porch of Saint Anne (see figure 8.6). Fulcanelli informs us that this statue “describes the shortest practice of our Science and among lessons in stone it therefore deserves pride of place.” This short or dry path, in contrast to the longer moist method, is done with “[o]ne single vessel, one single matter, one single furnace,” and can be accomplished in days rather than months or years. “The hermetic emblem of this method,” Fulcanelli assures us, can be found on the dragon and its pillar.9
Considering that Fulcanelli cites no fewer than three other hermeticists on the image of Saint Marcel and the dragon, we might suppose that this is indeed the key alchemical figure on the entire cathedral. This suspicion is heightened by the quote from Grillot de Givry that Fulcanelli uses to launch his discussion: “See . . . sculptured on the right portal of Notre Dame of Paris, the bishop perched above an athenor, where the philosophical mercury, chained in limbo, is being sublimated. It teaches the origin of the sacred fire; and the Chapter of the cathedral, by leaving this door closed all the year in accordance with a secular tradition, shows that this is not the vu
lgar way, but one unknown to the crowd and reserved for the small number of the elite of Wisdom.”10 From this we may safely assume that if there ever was a single agreedupon image on Notre Dame that did in fact sum up the innermost secret of alchemy, Saint Marcel and the dragon is it.
When Fulcanelli finally turns to a description of the dragon and its markings, after a lengthy digression on the nature of the dry method and a few swipes at restorers who don’t understand what they are restoring, we find a very precise depiction of what can only be the dragon axes:
A longitudinal band, beginning at the head and following the line of the backbone to the end of the tail.
Two similar bands, placed obliquely, one on each wing.
Two broader transverse bands round the tail of the dragon, the first at the level of the wings, the other above the head of the king. All these bands are ornamented with full circles, touching at a point on their circumference.11
Just to make sure that we have not missed his point, Fulcanelli continues: “As for the meaning, this will be supplied by the circles on the tail bands: the centre is very clearly marked on each one of them. Now, the hermeticists know that the king of the metals is symbolized by the solar sign, that is to say a circumference, with or without a central point. It therefore seems reasonable to me that if the dragon is covered in a profusion of auric symbols—it has them right down to the claws of the right paw—this is because it is capable of transmuting in quantity. . . .”12
We can recognize these symbols from the discussion in chapter 4. Fulcanelli notes a line down the spine of the dragon, from head to tail, and this is clearly a teli or dragon axis. This image could be representing either or both of the great axes, from the center to edge of the galaxy as well as the ecliptic pole axis from the constellation Draco, the Dragon, to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. It also symbolizes all the other uses of the head and tail of the dragon, from marking the moments of eclipses to marking the standstill and equal points of the solar cycle.
