The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  The lines on the wings represent the backward-moving precessional alignment of the dragon axis, which forms the Cube of Space in conjunction with the other two, more stable axes. On the dragon, these lines are not perpendicular, but are instead set at an oblique angle. Since the original has been lost, we can’t measure their angle, but it is just possible that it matched the winter-solstice position, measured from the galactic axis, appropriate for the time it was built, roughly 720 years ago, or ten degrees of precessional arc from a cubic alignment, as is illustrated in figure 8.7.

  The two bands of circles on the dragon’s tail can be seen as representations of the two opposite-moving cycles, the procession of the solar year and the precession of the Great Year. As Fulcanelli tells us, these are in fact solar symbols, noting the solar or zodiacal quality of the months or ages in each cycle. Saint Marcel’s dragon is therefore none other than the grand Leviathan of Heaven, the triple dragon axis from which the Cube of Space is formed, displayed as an all-at-once symbol of the entire astronomical and eschatological process underlying alchemy. As it is also a description of the quick or dry path of alchemy, the secret of secrets, then we can see why this image, above all others, is the major initiatory key to the Gothic alchemists, including Fulcanelli.

  Figure 8.7. This figure illustrates the precession of the equinoxes. The equinox point on the ecliptic moves one degree counterclockwise every seventy-two years, causing the equinox points to move backward through the zodiac one sign every 2,160 years. When the spring or vernal equinox fell on Aries/Pisces in the second century B.C.E., the winter solstice fell on Capricorn/Sagittarius. As we are now entering a new precessional era, the spring equinox and the winter solstices are moving backward toward the cusps of Sagittarius/Scorpio and Pisces/Aquarius. Around 1100 C.E., the actual winter solstice point moved across the January 6 Epiphany date, sparking a wave of millennial fervor.

  We can also be sure that Fulcanelli wants us to connect this dragon to the Teli of the Bahir, because he also describes the decoration on the plinth in terms of the Tree of Life: “Finally, on each side of the athenor and under the very claws of the dragon are the five unities of the quintessence, comprising the three principles and the two natures, and finally their total in the number ten ‘in which everything finishes and comes to an end.’ ”13

  The last phrase is an unattributed paraphrase from the Sefer Yetzirah: “Their measure is ten which have no end; a depth of beginning and a depth of ending.” The Sefer Yetzirah continues in the same vein: “Their vision is like the appearance of lightning and their limit has no end.”14 The Sefer Yetzirah is describing the ten sefirot or emanations of divinity and the twenty-two letters that connect them. These philosophical speculations would be organized in the Bahir into the Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life. Fulcanelli, with his sly paraphrase, directs us toward the real secret of Saint Marcel and the dragon. It is the plinth that holds the mystery.

  On the plinth in figure 8.6, we see a central pillar on each face, and four common pillars, one on each corner. Fulcanelli tells us that the athenor is formed from the four elemental qualities. Following the directions from the Sefer Yetzirah, to which Fulcanelli has guided us, we can see four overlapping trees on the cubic plinth. We can place the middle pillar of the Tree of Life on the face of the plinth, or on the corner pillar, and still be correct, although the overall design suggests that the corners are the middle pillars of the Tree. In any case, we have the Tree of Life within the Stone of the Wise, which is described in the Bahir and was discussed in chapter 4.

  Therefore, in this one symbol, Fulcanelli presents us with a capsule summary of the important points of the ancient illuminated astronomy. Since the Templars were known to have been involved in financing the construction of the Porch of Saint Anne, we might expect that this singular symbol would also reveal something of their secrets. And indeed, the dragon curls around a man’s head as it emerges from its athenor, symbolizing the connection between the Templars’ Baphomet, the head that symbolized the bet’amet, or place of truth, and illuminated astronomy.

  We may take this as evidence that the secret of astro-alchemy is truly displayed on the Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame. The image of Bishop Marcel’s dragon serves as a thread linking the ancient wisdom of Abraham, Solomon, and the Sabeans with the mystery schools of Alexandria and the medieval secret societies that built the cathedrals. The thread continues down to Fulcanelli, who, knowing the secret, chose his images carefully to fill in the outline of the ancient wisdom.

  At first, Fulcanelli’s choice of images, out of the many available to him on the facade of Notre Dame and its porches, seems whimsical or even just a chaotic deluge of allusions and interconnections. Only when his pattern of selection is correctly seen as an attempt to present a specific interpretation of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, as suggested by the dragon’s plinth, does the apparent chaos resolve into the masterly order of the hermetic grand theme.

  This grand theme of ten spheres and twenty-two paths, the Tree of Life, is augmented by Fulcanelli’s juxtaposition of symbols from other locations, such as Amiens cathedral and private houses in latefifteenth-century Bourges. Fulcanelli’s system of symbolic juxtaposition reveals, in ways not unlike that of surrealist art, deeper meanings behind the emerging symbolic construct. It is almost as if Fulcanelli, the master of symbolic art, had inadvertently stumbled onto the magic secret of surrealism. Or, more likely, surrealism is merely the latest artistic expression of a hermetic worldview stretching back into the myths of antiquity.

  THE WORLD TREE AND ASTRO-ALCHEMY

  Our earliest surviving alchemical text, the Egypto-Hebraic “Isis the Prophetess,” tells us that Isis received the secrets of alchemy from a composite being, Amnael, whose name is suggestive of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. But what, exactly, is the Tree of Life?

  To the ancient Egyptians, the Tree of Life was symbolized by the Djed pillar, the backbone of Osiris (see fig. 8.8). The Djed began as a power object in the Neolithic cultures of the Nile delta. It symbolized “stability,” or rather “divine establishment.” The World Tree or World Axis is a common motif in shamanic traditions that stands for the infrastructure of the universe. As this symbolic image/idea of the world pillar as axis of the universe became a word, djed, it was associated with similar-sounding words in order to give it a phonetic spelling. Djed is also the Egyptian word for “to speak,” “to declare,” “to say.” With emphasis, Ddd-jed, it is the sacred word itself, speech deified. Interesting as this is, it is the other roots that really strike a suggestive nerve. Djedd, same word with a slightly different emphasis, means “star” or, actually, the culmination or azimuth of the star. This same word, djedd, is also a perfectly good Hebrew word dzeth, and they both mean “olive tree.” The same word, in very similar pronunciation, is found in both Coptic and Arabic. The olive tree is the original Tree of Life, perhaps even the burning bush of Moses (see the light verse, Koran 28:37). The combination of the idea of star and the image of the Tree of Life suggests an interesting cluster of meaning associated with the Djed.

  The roots of these Egyptian words form a complex that encompasses the concepts of speech, including divine speech, the culmination or zenith of a star, and an olive tree, the Tree of Life itself. This complex web of words tells us that the ancient Egyptians thought of the Djed as something divinely pronounced, a “word-tree” that links life on earth and the stars.

  The Indo-European group of languages has a complex of root words that are similar to that which we have just outlined in Egyptian for the word djed. In the reconstructed language known as proto-Indo-European, the World Tree is the oak, *drw. Just as the olive tree was the Tree of Life in the Mediterranean—because of its ability to supply food and therefore ensure social stability—the oak provided the same benefits for the ancient Indo-Europeans wandering out of the central Asian grasslands into the vast forests of postglacial Europe. The word for “oak” also meant “firm,” “strong,” “stable,” and “enduring” in the I
ndo-European language groups. Our English words truth, trust, and tree come from the same root word. Druid is also in the *drw family and means “seer of the oak.”

  In Sanskrit, another Indo-European language, the word for “tree” is daru, a derivation of *drw. In the Rigveda, the ancient ceremonial hymns of the Indo-Aryan conquerors of India, we read that the Tree is the material “from which the gods have fashioned Heaven and earth, the stationary, the undecaying, giving protection to the deities.”15 The Tree is the cosmic pillar around which the entire universe was thought to revolve. This World Tree was often shown in Indian folk art as a great tree crowned with the Pole Star, which is called dhruva, another derivative of *drw, and which meant the “firm one” or “fixed one.”

  Figure 8.8. The Egyptian Djed pillar, World Tree and backbone of Osiris. To the ancient Egyptians it was the divinely pronounced Word/World Tree connecting life on Earth with the cosmic drama of the stars.

  To the rational mind, this idea of the Pole Star as an eternal tree strikes us as a kind of nonsense. Yet in an experiment conducted by Dr. Jonathan Shear of Maharishi University in the late 1970s, we find that this tree embodies a strange kind of truth.

  The experiment centered on a sutra in part three of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra that states that “by performing samyama on the Dhruva, the Pole Star, one gains knowledge of the motion of the stars.”16 Samyama is a deep state of rapport that allows for an actual transfer of energy or information with whatever one is focusing on, be it an image of a deity or the Pole Star.17

  In his paper, published in the January 1981 edition of the journal Metaphilosophy, Shear reports that he expected his subjects, all skilled meditators, “to perceive the motion of the stars in the context of the heavens as we are accustomed to perceive and think about them.” This, however, didn’t happen. The meditators were instructed to do the practice that would induce the state of samyama while holding their focus on the Pole Star. The expectation was that if they received any insight at all into the workings of the Pole Star, it would be in the form of commonly perceived images and concepts.

  However, instead of the usual time-lapse sky wheel familiar to us from Life magazine photo spreads, the meditators reported something very different. “The Pole Star is seen [in the meditators’ inner vision] at the end of a long rotating shaft of light. Rays of light come out from the shaft like the ribs of an umbrella. The umbrella-like structure on which the stars are embedded is seen as rotating. . . . The whole experience is described as quite spectacular, blissful, colorful and melodious.”18

  The meditators themselves were taken by surprise by this experience. They had no idea that this image of the World Tree was an actual archetype—that is, something that exists outside themselves in the collective unconscious—until they stumbled across it. Shear is emphatic when he states: “[T]he experience is the innocent by-product of the proper practice of the technique.” In other words, the practice triggers an experience that is contradictory to the commonsense and educated perspectives of the experiencer.

  Here is our archetypal Djed. The Rigveda tells us that “on top of the distant sky there stands / The Word encompassing all.” Stability, in the sense of the word djed, the backbone of Osiris as the World Tree, becomes the link between earth and the stars. We are stable only as long as we are connected to our stellar source. At the very least, Shear’s experiment shows us that a spiritual rapport with the stars can produce information not available to the senses. The image of the World Tree and its umbrella-like spokes is not apparent to the observer. It can be perceived only by entering a state of consciousness where its nature can be experienced.

  The ancient seers used techniques such as those in Shear’s study to investigate the universe around them.19 The information they received from these practices became coded into the religious myths, symbols, and structures of the ancient world. This spiritual canon, or structured and geometric organizational hierarchy, is the mathematical equivalent of the green language of the troubadours. “Let none ignorant of geometry enter here” hung over the door of Plato’s academy in Athens for good reason.

  This ancient canon of number almost disappeared with fall of the ancient world. It survived in fragments and in the quotations of the ancients, until an almost unknown English scholar named William Stirling wrote the first formal explication of it since Vitruvius in ancient Rome. Published anonymously in 1897, his book, entitled The Canon: An Exposition of the Pagan Mystery Perpetuated in the Cabala as the Rule of All Art, managed, like Fulcanelli’s Mystery of the Cathedrals, to become influential in spite of its obscurity. It inspired thinkers as diverse as the psychic archaeologist F. Bligh Bond and the perennial Victorian bad-boy magician Aleister Crowley, who liberally sprinkled his work with swipes from Stirling.

  According to Keith Critchlow, a geometric philosopher and student of Buckminster Fuller, “the Canon is based on the objective fact that events and physical changes which are perpetual are never the less completely governed by intrinsic proportions, periodicities and measures.” As Critchlow notes, “[I]t is to just such a hidden intrinsic language that the author of this book (Stirling) has dedicated himself.”20

  In his chapter on rhetoric, one of the liberal arts surrounding Alchemy on the base of Notre Dame’s middle pillar, Stirling gives us a simple description of the Great Tree of Life: “The process of creation may be expressed by inscribing the cabalistic diagram in the upper hemisphere, so that the apex or crown reaches to the Milky Way, while the tenth step will coincide with earth.”21 Stirling’s “cabalistic diagram” is the ten-step pattern of unfoldment known to occultists as the Tree of Life, and according to his explication, it is the basic pattern of the canon itself.

  He writes: “The doctrine of the Cabala was reduced to a geometric diagram, in which ten steps were grouped according to a progressive scheme, so that the emanations of the Spirit of the Elohim issues from the first step called the Crown, and after passing through the whole figure is carried through the ninth step, and finally reaches the tenth or last of the series.”22 This cabalistic diagram described by Stirling was first elucidated in the second-century Sefer Yetzirah. It depicts reality as the intersection of four different levels of abstraction.

  Stirling tells us that “the ideas which the ancients connected . . . and combined into this figure of ten progressive steps, appears to form the basis of all their philosophy, religion, and art, and in it we have the nearest approach to a direct revelation of the traditional science, or Gnosis, which was never communicated except by myths and symbols.”23 From this we can see that the framework, the gnostic pattern, behind the universal language of symbolism, the language of the birds and the green language, is this great Word/World Tree of geometry.

  Since Fulcanelli informs us that the argotique of the green language is based on a cabalistic pattern of meaning, it should be obvious that this pattern is the Tree of Life of his fellow adepts. That it is not obvious is the result of misdirection, conscious or unconscious, on the part of Fulcanelli’s student, Eugène Canseliet.

  In the “Preface to the Second Edition” of Mystery of the Cathedrals, Canseliet, while displaying his knowledge of the importance of stellar imagery in his master’s work, ends with a major piece of misinformation. He states that the justification for the republication of the book lies in the fact “that this book has restored to light the phonetic cabala, whose principles and applications had been completely lost.” While this is somewhat true, Canseliet goes on to conclude that after his and Fulcanelli’s work, “this mother tongue need never be confused with the Jewish Kabbalah.”24

  He continues by asserting that “the Jewish Kabbalah is full of transpositions, inversions, substitutions and calculations, as arbitrary as they are abstruse.” Again this is true for many explications of the kabbalistic mystery, but it does not address the issue of the universality of the Tree of Life itself. Canseliet further muddies the water by suggesting that cabala and Kabbalah are derived from different roots. Cabala,
he declares, is derived from the Latin caballus, or “horse,” while Kabbalah is derived from the Hebrew word for tradition. On the surface, this is indeed correct, but Canseliet is skillfully avoiding the deeper meanings of both these words, which leads us ultimately to their common root—kaba, the stone.

  Fulcanelli never voiced such opinions in the body of the book. In Mystery of the Cathedrals, he obliquely refers to the cabala as the “language of the gods” and scorns the “would-be cabalists . . . whether they be Jewish or Christian,” and “the would-be experts, whose illusory combinations lead to nothing concrete.”25 He goes on to say: “Let us leave these doctors of the Kabbalah to their ignorance,” implying those who claimed to be authorities on the Hebrew Kabbalah. He says nothing against the Kabbalah itself but merely notes that it is misunderstood by almost everyone. By implication, Fulcanelli is also saying that he does understand it properly.

  As we saw in chapter 2, “Isis the Prophetess” points to a Tree of Life motif for its source of wisdom. The Hebrew spelling of Amnael’s name gives us a clue to its nature. Using Hebrew gematria, the letters in the name add up to 123, the number of the three-part name of God, AHH YHVH ELOHIM, associated with the top three sefirot on the Tree of Life, Kether, Chokmah, and Binah (see fig. 2.9). As noted already, if we break the name into Amn and ael, we get the numbers 91 and 32. These are both references to the Tree of Life, 32 being the total number of paths and sefirot and 91 being the number of the Hebrew word amen, AMN, and the word for “tree,” AYLN.

  Stirling, in his rediscovery of the ancient canon, concludes that the Tree of Life is the pattern that underlies the secret language of symbolism, which is the language expressed by the liberal arts that accompany Alchemy/Philosophy on the base of the middle pillar of the Porch of Judgment. Fulcanelli himself points to the Tree of Life as the key secret in his description of the dragon’s plinth, going so far as to paraphrase the Sefer Yetzirah.