by Jay Weidner
“Just as the human soul has its hidden recesses, so the cathedral has its secret passages.” Fulcanelli guides us through the crypt, a word from the same Greek root as Venus and copper, of the cathedrals to the secret hiding place of Isis, the Black Virgin. He quotes the “learned Pierre Dujols” that this Black Virgin is an “astronomical theogany,” the Mother of the Gods, the Great Idea, as the stone at Die informs us, and then states that the esoteric meaning of the Black Virgin could not be better defined. Theogany, however, is a curious word, suggesting a blend of meaning. A theogony (as in Hesiod) is an account of the birth of the gods or a genealogy of the gods, while a theogamy is a marriage of the gods, a version of the hieros gamos. The original French theogany suggests both of these, implying a genealogy of the union of earth and sky. Using this odd word in conjunction with the Die stone and its associations with Cybele and the stone that fell from heaven suggests that both Fulcanelli and Dujols were aware of the tradition we have examined above.
In the mention of Dujols here, we are tempted to see a clever tip of the hat from pseudonym to real person, or from teacher to student, but however we read the personalities, the meaning is clear. The Black Virgin is a symbol of an ancient “astronomical theogany,” centered on the mystery of the heavenly stone. In hermetic symbolism, Fulcanelli informs us, this “theogany” is “the virgin earth, which the artist must choose as the subject of his Great Work.” He quotes an unreferenced text on the “black substance,” one of the few occasions when Fulcanelli does something so unscholarly, and then hurries on to a list of the surviving Black Virgins.
Figure 9.9. The Black Virgin of Saint Victor’s in Marseilles. (Plate 1 in Le Mystère des cathédrales)
Since Ean Begg’s masterly opus on the subject covers all of the Black Virgins listed by Fulcanelli, we shall merely refer the reader to his work. Fulcanelli lists seven famous Black Virgins: two at Chartres; one at Puy; one, illustrated, from Saint Victor’s in Marseilles (fig. 9.9); one each at Rocamadour and Vichy; and one at Quimper. He then mentions the Black Virgin seen by Camille Flammarion in the crypt of the Observatory, and called Our Lady Underground, in order to round out his eight.
Fulcanelli then shifts to the very ancient statues of Isis mentioned by Witkowski and formerly found at Metz and Lyons. From there, he launches into an examination of the “cult of Isis, the Egyptian Ceres.” This he equates, with no more reference than a quote from Herodotus, to the hermetic sciences. He divides the order into four degrees that are suggestive on many levels. Fulcanelli, however, seems to be using insider information here, information whose source, probably because of an oath, he cannot reveal. He wants us to note the egg, “the symbol of the world,” and the four degrees of initiation represented by the Sun, Moon, Mercury, and hierophant, and tries in the next paragraph to give us some glimpse of their meaning.
In many, many ways, this is the most important single paragraph in Fulcanelli’s entire book. He begins by directing us back to the stone at Die, which labeled Isis as the mother of the gods, whom he identifies with Rhea or Cybele. From there, he takes us to a village church in the Camargue where until 1610 a bas-relief featuring Cybele and with an inscription reading MATRI DEUM could be seen. Then he jumps to Phrygia, where the Goddess was worshipped as a black stone that fell from heaven, echoing the lapsit exillis of Wolfram’s Parzival. He tells us that she was also worshipped seated between two lions, holding a key as if to draw back her veil with it. These images, piled on top of the other images in this chapter and so far in the first chapter, compel us to look at the whole subject of esotericism, hermeticism, Christianity, and religion in general in a wholly unique light, as we have seen in the earlier chapters of this book.
Following the clues he gave us, we have come to a surprising answer. Alchemy, the sword in the stone, and the Tree of Life all have to do with universal or cosmological forces whose origins seem to be in the patterns of the heavens themselves. Fulcanelli is leading us into ever-deeper symbolic waters while very subtly building a solid ground of understanding beneath us. In this first section, he is laying the metaphysical underpinning upon which he will erect, in the rest of the book, his edifice of Gothic understanding. This will become even clearer as we turn to the last section in the chapter, which represents the ninth sefirah, Yesod, or Foundation, attributed to the Moon. For Fulcanelli, the foundation of his metaphysical system is the Gothic church, the exemplar of which is the Philosophers’ Church, Notre-Dame-de-Paris.
And for those of you waiting for Fulcanelli to make explicit the connection between the Black Virgin and the sefirah Hod, or the planet Mercury, you may relax. Fulcanelli cites eight Black Virgins and mentions Mercury in his discussion of the mysteries of Ceres, just to let us know that he hasn’t forgotten his pattern, but he never otherwise makes the connection apparent.
However, if we remember that in Egyptian myth, Isis learned magic from Thoth/Hermes, the Egyptian Mercury, then connection becomes the information itself, the secret language of the Magi. As we explore Fulcanelli’s evolving pattern on the Tree of Life, we shall see this meaning for Hod become even clearer. In this usage, Fulcanelli will examine the nature of the Philosophic Mercury and its role in the formation of the first matter. But that is still to come, and for now Fulcanelli is content to have us focused on Isis as we turn to the church of Our Lady.
Fulcanelli opens the last section of his first chapter by telling us that “having disposed of these preliminaries,” he will now turn to a hermetic examination of one specific cathedral, Notre-Dame-de-Paris. However, he warns us that his task will be difficult, because, unlike the medieval students of the Art, the modern hermeticist must deal with the ravages of both time and vandalism.
This is a complex section, in which the motif is clearly the foundation of the church, in several different meanings of the word, from the eleven-step foundation upon which the church was built to the foundation of its Gothic art in the spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Mixed in with this subtle foundational imagery is Fulcanelli’s nod to the whole sword-in-the-stone pattern, along with an examination of two statues that no longer grace the cathedral front.
The first of these stood above the fountain in the parvis of Notre Dame, the street in front of the cathedral. Fulcanelli describes it as “a tall, narrow stone statue, holding a book in one hand and a snake in the other.” He quotes the inscription on the now lost statue: “You, who are thirsty, come hither: if, by chance the fountain fails / The goddess has, by degrees, prepared the everlasting waters.” He also tells us that the common people called it “Monsieur Legris (Mr. Grey)” or “the Fasting Man of Notre Dame.”
Fulcanelli turns to Amédée de Ponthieu, a nineteenth-century folklore scholar, to explain the meaning of this fountain. This is odd, because, as Fulcanelli admits, Amédée is no hermeticist. However, the good folklorist collected the very ancient insights that Fulcanelli needed to convey. He tells us that the statue was called the Son of Apollo, Phoebigenus, as well as the Master Peter, “meaning master stone, stone of power.” Amédée lists the various identities proposed for the statue, including “Esculapius, Mercury, or the god Terminus,” “Archambaud, Mayor of the Palace” in Merovingian times, Guillaume de Paris, the master mason of Notre Dame, and even Christ and Saint Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris.
Amédée also informs us that the statue was removed when the square was enlarged in 1748. The interesting point is that Fulcanelli does not tell us his source for the inscription on the fountain. Amédée seems not to have mentioned it, since none of his suggestions is a goddess. So, we are left with the small mystery of how Fulcanelli knew of the inscription. From small mysteries such as this, we shall find that the larger mystery of Fulcanelli himself can be unraveled. However, when that mystery is resolved, we shall find that “Fulcanelli” has left us with even larger questions, even greater mysteries, yet to be answered.
From the statue and the fountain, Fulcanelli turns to another lost figure, that of Saint Christopher, which stood
with its back to the first pillar on the right as one entered the nave until its destruction in 1781. He tells us of other Saint Christophers removed around the same time, and suggests the ones that remain do so only because they are either a fresco or a part of the wall. He concludes that behind such acts “there must obviously have been powerful motives.”
Fulcanelli speculates that this reason could have been related to the statues’ hermetic symbolism. He reveals the primitive name of Saint Christopher, Offerus, with its echoes of Orpheus the Gnostic Greek Christ, and then goes on to tell us that this Christopher, “he who carries Christ” to the masses, is also “Chrysopher,” or “he who carries gold” to the hermeticist. And then Fulcanelli adds a few sentences in green-language code that go to the heart of the matter.
“From this one can better understand the extreme importance of the symbol of St. Christopher. It is the hieroglyph of the solar sulphur (Jesus), of the nascent gold, raised on the mercurial waters and then carried, by the proper energy of this Mercury, to the degree of power possessed by the Elixir.”
In these lines, we shall find by the end of our quest that Fulcanelli has not only explained the secret of the alchemical transformation, but also pointed in very direct language at the true meaning and history of Christianity. The key, of course, is the meaning and origin of the Saint Christopher myth. Fulcanelli will return to this topic later in the book, when we see that the Saint Christopher myth is actually part of a much larger, galactic-scale, in fact, cosmological myth. For now, though, Fulcanelli gives us one more spin on the Saint Christopher motif.
He draws our attention to an ancient statue at Rocamadour in Brittany, a Saint Christopher high on the Saint-Michel heights guarding an old chest out of which protrudes a broken sword chained to the rock. He tells us that this is an example of all the ancient sword-in-the-stone myths, validating our design supposition while expanding the concept to include all sorts of rod-and-stone motifs, from Moses to Atalanta the Amazon’s javelin. They are all “the same hieroglyph of this hidden matter of the Philosophers, whose nature is indicated by St. Christopher and the result by the iron-bound chest.”
Fulcanelli ends the chapter with an attack on the Renaissance, and Francis I in particular, while looking back with longing on the splendor of the Middle Ages. “From the twelfth to the fifteenth century, there was poverty of media, but a wealth of expression; from the sixteenth century onwards, art has shown beauty of form, but mediocrity of invention.” He instructs us that Renaissance art exalts the senses and the ego, while in Gothic art “the actual execution remains subordinate to the idea; in Renaissance art, it dominates and obliterates the idea.”
And to Fulcanelli, this split is the cause of all the artistic and political chaos that has since been the lot of mankind. In these paragraphs, however, we shall find that there is more than just a romantic theory of art. There is also the germ of a clue to the political upheavals that produced the Renaissance. But that is a subject for later. For now, let us agree with Fulcanelli that the world is indeed impoverished by the loss of such wisdom and skill, such understanding and execution, as was once lavished on the Gothic cathedrals.
THE ALCHEMY OF LIGHT: FULCANELLI’S KABBALAH
The Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life from the Bahir and the Sefer Yetzirah, can be seen as the prototypical kabbalistic pattern, a sort of symbolic geometry (see fig. 9.10). In Le Mystère, Fulcanelli shows us this by his arrangement of chapters and sections and the images within those sections. Fulcanelli gives us four chapters in the first edition: “The Mystery of the Cathedrals,” “Paris,” “Amiens,” and “Bourges.” These represent the four worlds, or levels of abstraction, and a Tree of Life, or a part of one, forms in each world.
The first chapter, “The Mystery of the Cathedrals,” contains nine internal sections, as we saw above, each of which can be attributed to one of the sefirot from Kether to Yesod. This first tree is the kabbalistic Divine World, Atzilut, where the theory of creation is displayed. Interestingly enough, Fulcanelli’s thematic breaks in this section, while evolving the sefirot in the basic lightning-path order (see figures 9.4 and 9.5), divides naturally into a sword-in-the-stone pattern. The first three sections form the hilt, the next five compose the stone, and the continuation of thought from section 1 straight through into section 9 creates the blade of the sword.
Figure 9.10. Three different versions of the Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life. A. from a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Zohar; B. from the Sefer Yetzirah, nineteenth century; C. from a fifteenth-century woodcut.
The next chapter, “Paris,” creates an entire Tree of Life, with the addition of an image from the first chapter, the Black Madonna, in the position of Binah. This arrangement, as we shall see, is a clue to the astronomical nature of this archetypal Tree of Life. On a projected or celestial Tree of Life, the earth’s pole is tilted toward Binah—the Dark Mother of the Cosmic Sea in kabbalistic symbology—hence its importance in Fulcanelli’s design. He continues the pattern with the Kether image Alchemy from the main porch at Notre Dame and the Chokmah image of the alchemist from the south tower. These three images form the top three sefirot, the Supernatural Triad, and then, quite appropriately, Fulcanelli creates a break to represent the abyss of Daat, or gnosis.
He starts over at the bottom, at the foot of the Path of Return, the Serpent’s Path back up the Tree. Plates 4 through 25, discussed in the “Paris” chapter of Le Mystère, represent the paths on the Tree, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the trumps of the Tarot, and are attributed to the twenty-two individual letter paths that connect the sefirot listed above. Their pattern is the classical Path of Return, pictured as a snake winding its way up the Tree (see fig. 9.11). For example, plate 4, called “The mysterious Fountain at the foot of the Old Oak,” is attributed to the letter tau and the Tarot image The World, linking the pilgrimage and persecution of the Kingdom, Malkuth, with the foundational symbology of Notre-Dame-de-Paris and with heraldry, the Grail legends, and the philosophical dew in the sefirah of Yesod. Filling in the rest of the Tree with these symbols reveals the ongoing alchemical process of creation.
With plate 26, the sefirot pattern picks up with Daat, the gnosis of the abyss, and proceeds down the Tree to plate 32, an image of the Massacre of the Innocents from Saint-Chapelle, appropriate for Malkuth considering what happened to the Gnostic current in the West. Fulcanelli has here provided us with a very clear and direct image of the entire thirty-two components of the classical Etz Chaim symbology (see fig. 9.12). In terms of worlds, this second level is the archetypal Briah, or the World of Ideas. Fulcanelli demonstrates this by including an almost complete idea Tree at this level. Our inspiration, of course, Binah or the Black Isis Madonna, comes across from the realm of the Divine.
Figure 9.11. The Serpent’s Path or Path of Return up the Tree of Life.
The next level or world is Yetzirah, the World of Formation or the etheric world. This is the level of the astral or spiritual world so beloved of shamans and mystics of all sorts. Fulcanelli shows great restraint by describing only part of the etheric Tree. He focuses on the seven planetary intelligences and their influence on alchemy. In these seven images, six shown and one mentioned only in the text, Fulcanelli gives us clues to the operational nature of the work. The unshown image is the hidden sun, the mythical sun behind the sun, and the formative images all seem to show how this hidden or Dark Sun affects the planetary intelligences. Since these intelligences are also attributed to the seven metals, there does indeed seem to be a vast operational secret contained in these images.
Once this multiple Tree of Life pattern is built up from the sections of the first chapter and the plates from Notre Dame and Amiens, with a few extra additions from Sainte-Chapelle, Saint Victor, and elsewhere, an understanding of the basic process of astro-alchemy can be gleaned. This is the real secret, and from Fulcanelli’s point of view there is no mystery about it. But once this secret is revealed, Fulcanelli goes on to propose a fourth Tree of Life that ne
atly ties the historical, mythological, and cosmological elements into one coherent framework.
Figure 9.12. The Tree of Life illustrated with plates from Fulcanelli’s “Paris” chapter in Le Mystère des cathédrales.
This fourth Tree of Life pattern represents the world of action, our world of stars and suns and planets. This Tree of Life grows out of Bourges in Berry. Fulcanelli ignores the town’s Gothic cathedral, with its stunning apocalyptic stained glass, and concentrates on two contemporaries of Good King René in the mid-fifteenth century, Jacques Coeur and Jean Lallemant, and their respective houses. This is a significant departure; up to this point Fulcanelli has focused exclusively on cathedrals. This departure signals the shift from the theoretical and mystical to the operational. Here we are firmly in the world of action. (See appendix D for a complete outline of Fulcanelli’s four Trees.)
Fulcanelli is pointing us toward a moment in the late fifteenth century when the underground stream at last broke the surface of history. He suggests that the mystery of Bourges is the mystery of the esoteric current in the ancient past, the present of the fifteenth century, and the future down to and beyond the twentieth century. The mystery of initiation encompasses a vast reach of time, Fulcanelli insists, but the strands of the tapestry emerged into a pattern at Bourges in the mid-1400s.
Fulcanelli directs our attention toward eight images in the two houses. Two are from Jacques Coeur’s house (plates 39 and 40) and six are from Lallemant (plates 41–46). They can be analyzed as two images that establish both individuals as alchemists, the scallop shell and the vessel of the Great Work; three historical and mythological themes, Tristan and Isolde, the Golden Fleece, and Saint Christopher; and three initiatory images from the inner sanctum of Lallemant mansion, the pillars, the ceiling, and the credence of the chapel.
