The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  Although Fulcanelli declares, somewhat disingenuously, that “Hendaye has nothing to hold the interest of the tourist, the archaeologist or the artist,” the region does have a rather curious history. A young Louis XIV met his bride on an island in the bay below Hendaye, along the boundary between Spain and France. Wellington passed through, making nearby Saint-Jean-de-Luz his base of operation against Toulouse at the close of the Napoleonic Wars. Hitler also paid a visit, during World War II; in 1940 he parked his train car within walking distance of the cross at Hendaye.

  The region has other, more esoteric connections as well. Hendaye is in Basque country, and the Basque people’s genetic makeup has proved to be unlike any other in Europe. The Basque language is also a mystery. It is one of only five non-Indo-European languages to survive, and it has no links to any other language in Europe. These facts have suggested to some researchers that the Basques are the remnants of a global pre-catastrophe civilization, the lost “Atlanteans” to the more imaginative. The Basques were also well known for their magical practices, and were the focus, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, of a major Inquisitional witch hunt.2

  When Fulcanelli visited in the 1920s, Hendaye was a very small town. He noted its “little houses huddled at the foot of the first spurs of the Pyrenees,” and commented on the “rough and rugged landscape” in which “the natural austerity of the wild scene is scarcely relieved by the headland of Fuenterrabia, showing ochre in the crude light, thrusting into the dark greyish-green mirror-calm waters of the gulf.”3

  Keep in mind that, although “The Cyclic Cross at Hendaye,” the penultimate chapter of Mystery of the Cathedrals, was apparently written in the mid-1920s, it was added to the book only when it was republished in 1957. Hardly anyone in the occult world noticed this addition or commented on it, perhaps because it doesn’t fit neatly into any of the preconceived notions of alchemy. The importance of Hendaye is revealed by Fulcanelli’s declaration: “Whatever its age, the Hendaye cross shows by the decoration of its pedestal that it is the strangest monument of primitive millenarism [sic], the rarest symbolical translation of chiliasm, which I have ever met.”4

  Because Fulcanelli openly connected alchemy and the apocalypse, the true nature of that very specific gnostic astro-alchemical meme whose fingerprints we have traced through several millennia emerged into public consciousness. This meant that the secret was no longer contained among the elect societies. For the first time since the age of the Gothic cathedrals, the meme had broken out of its incubational structures.

  In a way, the cross and its message serve as proof that there are such things as secret societies. Found throughout history, these societies preserve and present the secret of the cross in various ways. The Kabbalah in Judaism, Sufic Islam, esoteric Christianity, Gnosticism, and the hermetic tradition have been the keepers of these ideas. The central message of the three main Western religions, that of an eschatological moment in time, is the secret that also lies at the heart of the cross at Hendaye. The meme, the ability to understand the myth and its metaphors, seems to have survived only through the actions of these secret and insular groups.

  The cross at Hendaye stands today at the southwest corner of Saint Vincent’s Church, on the busiest street corner in town. No one notices the ordinary-looking monument with its message of catastrophe; perhaps it was intended to be that way. The secret hides in plain sight.

  PRECESSIONAL MYTHMAKING AND AN ENIGMATIC ALTAR TO THE GOD OF TIME

  In 1901, a career civil servant in the British East India Company and former commissioner of the province of Bengal published what he thought would be a revolutionary work on ancient history and prehistoric star religions. History and Chronology of the Myth-Making Age, by James F. Hewitt, “late Commissioner of Chutia Nagpur,” as the title page styles it, is one of those grand summations of universal knowledge so beloved by the late Victorians. Hewitt, however, is not your usual colonial civil servant, and his work, unlike his contemporary James Churchward’s books on the lost continent of Mu, is actually based on solid linguistic ground, at least for the turn of the twentieth century. His work, with all its flaws, is a connection point for many pieces of the Hendaye puzzle, and it offers us another mysterious stone, one that just might be the original of the Hendaye cross.

  Hewitt’s expertise in Sanskrit is both the strength and the weakness of his argument. Sanskrit becomes the lens through which Hewitt views every other culture and mythic structure on the planet, and this produces some surprising distortions. Occasionally these funhouse-mirror images are accurate, if somewhat inexplicable. Hewitt is correct on things where he should be dead wrong and totally inaccurate only when he tries to convince us of the universality of his conclusions. But through the verdant and tangled overgrowth of Sanskrit roots and cultural imperialism, the outlines of something truly astonishing can be discerned. History and Chronology of the Myth-Making Age is not only an attempt at uncovering the origins of the symbolic green language, spoken, as Fulcanelli reminds us, by all initiates, but it is also a masterful attempt to link that symbolic argot to its source in the astronomy of precession. That Hewitt fails is not surprising; we are impressed, however, by the fact that he made such a valid attempt.

  With the first sentence of his preface, Hewitt informs us: “The Myth-making Age, the history of which I have sketched in this book, comprises the whole period from the first dawn of civilization . . . down to the time when the sun entered Taurus at the Vernal Equinox between 4000 and 5000 B.C.” He laments the lack of a precise date for this event, and then offers an average, 4500 B.C.E., which is close enough to be quite accurate. He tells us that this was the closing event in the mythmaking age, and that after this point, “it ceased to be a universally observed national custom to record history in the form of historical myths, and . . . national history began to pass out of the mythic stage into that of the annalistic chronicles recording the events of the reigns of kings and the deeds of individual heroes, statesmen and law-givers.”

  Making allowances for Hewitt’s anachronistic use of the word nation, we can discern something quite profound here. Around 6,000 years ago something did in fact shift. This is recorded in the Egyptian king lists and in Manetho’s chronology as the point where the Heru Shemsu, the blacksmiths of Edfu, ruled as transitional figures between the reigns of the living gods and the reigns of kings and pharaohs. It also marked the beginning of the spread of agricultural societies. Hewitt is also correct, for the wrong reasons as usual, that the Indo-European languages spread with the diffusion of agriculture across Europe. Modern linguistic archaeology places the origins of Indo-European languages and organized farming in Anatolia, homeland of Cybele, Mother of the Gods.5

  Identifying the spread of Indo-European with agriculture helps to explain how non-Indo-European languages, Finno-Ugaric, Hungarian, Estonian, Causasian, and Basque, survived in isolated pockets. These were places where, for whatever reasons, the old hunter-gatherer traditions survived. The Finno-Ugaric speakers still have a large nomadic population, the Laplanders, and the Hungarians were isolated by geography. The other three, Caucasian, Estonian, and Basque, were all fishing or trading communities. Of them all, only Basque has survived into the twenty-first century as a living language, and Basque culture has always been based on the sea.

  Hewitt has a curious view of the Basques as a mixture of his southern non-Indo-European agriculturalists and the northern Gotho-Celts, the European Aryan nomads and cattle-driving warrior-kings. From our modern archaeological perspective, we can see how skewed Hewitt’s premises are: The Neolithic Basques were not agriculturalists, for instance, and not even four hundred years of Pax Romanitas made much of a dent on their language or culture. And yet, Hewitt’s precessional mythology has many points of great interest to our research. How he came by this mythology is a subject to which we shall return a bit later, but first let’s take a look at the broad outline of this mythic pattern.

  According to Hewitt, the first myth
to develop among the agricultural societies was that of the Measurer of Time, analogous in Egyptian terms to Tehuti, who divided the solar year into two sections of thirtysix weeks of five days each to match the monsoon patterns in the Indus Valley, Hewitt’s original home of civilization.6 (Note that these are precessional numbers as well numbers related to the pentagram.) Hewitt also identifies his “Bird of Life” with the Egyptian khu, which he interprets to be a raven. This he identifies as the dark bird of the winds that divides the year by bringing the monsoons.

  In this first age, the focus of cosmogony, according to Hewitt, was the Pole Star and the Tree of Life that grew from it. Here he cites the Celtic myths related to the Grail, where “the world’s mother-tree was born from the seed brought by the rain-cloud-bird, the offspring of the Cauldron of Life, the creating-waters stored by the Pole Star god as the Holy Grail or Blood of God, and guarded by his raven vice-regent, the god whose name is Bran, in the watch-tower called the Caer Sidi or Turning Tower of the heavens.”7

  Hewitt’s next age presents a different cosmogony. Here the world is seen as an egg, laid by the Bird of Life in the Tree, and around which the serpent coils. Hewitt sees this as a new kind of Pole Star/World Tree alignment, and identifies the serpent as the ecliptic zodiac, thus making this alignment that of the north and south poles of the ecliptic. His origins for these concepts are entertaining as usual, including a race of Finnish ogres who worshipped the storm bird and the snake god, but the concept itself is, as we have seen, a crucial part of the ancient astronomy.

  His third myth-making age is strictly solar, evolving into the sun god as primeval ass or horse god. The process by which this occurs is too long to summarize, but Hewitt arrives at a series of images and metaphors that deserve quoting here:

  This last god, whose genealogy shows him to be the son or successor of the ass sun-god . . . was born, as I have shown, under the star Spica a Virgo the mother of corn. . . . The birth took place when the sun was in Virgo at the Vernal equinox, that is, between 13,000 and 12,000 B.C. . . . This primeval ass . . . who is said . . . to traverse the holy road of the divine order, the path of the god of annual time, was the god of the boring (tri) people, the beeinspired race. . . . They . . . were deft artificers, the first workers in metals, who introduced bronze and made the lunar sickle of Kronos . . . and the creating trident of Poseidon. This latter god was nurtured by them with a nymph, the daughter of the ocean Kapheria, the semitic Kabirah, the Arabic Kabar, the mother goddess of the Kabiri and another form of Harmonia, mother of the sons of the smiths of heaven. She was also the black Demeter of Phigalia, the goddess with the horse’s head who was violated by Poseidon. . . . We can thus by their genealogy trace their traditional history from between 14,000 and 15,000 B.C. to between 13,000 and 12,000 B.C. These priests were the Kuretes whose religious dances were circular gyrations like those of the heavenly bodies-8round the pole.8

  While Hewitt’s methods are decidedly odd, quoting a medieval Grail romance as a motif from around 18,000 B.C.E. might strike some scholars as downright bizarre, and his “facts” are, by anyone’s reckoning, inaccurate. We have no evidence for metalworking in Europe 15,000 years ago, for instance. But his symbolic mix of metaphors and mythology strikes us as meaningful, particularly in light of the research we presented in chapter 7. As we ponder these symbolic echoes and synchronistic themes, the conclusion dawns on us that Hewitt is trying to make the evidence, wherever he can find it, match the underlying esoteric understanding that he brings to this work. This underlying theme is absent in his earlier, and slightly more sound, Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times, published in 1894 and 1895. Between 1894 and 1900, Hewitt ran into a current of the underground stream of hermetic esotericism, one in which the secret of time, the eschatological secret at the core of alchemy, was sketched out in a specific way that was a blend of Indian sources and Western traditions.

  Before we go looking for Hewitt’s esoteric sources, we must look at one of Hewitt’s few pieces of physical evidence, and from the perspective of our research the most important part of Hewitt’s book. During his examination of the Second Age migrations of what he calls the “Turanic-Semitic seafaring races,” which, according to Hewitt, were the builders of the megalithic structures from Malta to Scandinavia, he turns to a carved stone found, he supposes, near the megalithic ruins of Carnac, in Brittany.

  Carnac, in Hewitt’s Sanskrit lens, is an example of the “Hindu ritual of the Soma sacrifice,” and therefore the rows of stones “mark in other particulars their descent from Indian year reckoning.” To back up this highly unusual, even for the time, contention, Hewitt points to “the Linga stone altar in the collection of M. du Chatellier at Kernuz, near Pont-l’Abbé, Finistere.” He declares that it follows the rules of form laid down by “the Hindu religious books,” and, as he examined it, he “saw at once” that whoever carved it “must have learnt the theology expressed in the engravings in India.”9 (See fig. 10.1B.)

  Hewitt’s description is important enough to quote at length.

  On the top there was drawn the St. Andrew’s cross (X) of the solsticial sun, the sign of the flying year-bird beginning its flight at the winter solstice. On one side was a pattern of interlaced female Su-astikas representing the annual course of the sun, beginning its journey round the heavens by going northward at the winter solstice. On the side next to this was the square of the eight-rayed star representing the union of the St. Andrew’s Cross of the solsticial sun with the St. George’s Cross of the Equinoctial sun (+).

  Hewitt then describes how, according to the ancient Vedic sages, this wheel of life was drawn as the dimensions of a cube marking the “history of the sun year,” and that “of the Su or Khu year-bird which explains the meaning and historical importance of the name Su-astika, denoting the yearly course round the eight (ashta) points of the heavens of the sun-bird.”

  He continues with the third side, on which was “a pattern of four leaves . . . arranged in the form of a St. Andrew’s Cross.” On the fourth and last side, he informs us, is a St. George’s Cross in the form of “a Palasha Tree.” Around the top of all four symbols, Hewitt describes “a scroll of female Su-astikas and at the bottom one of the snakes coiled in the form of the cross bar of the male Su-astika.” Then Hewitt tells us that the sculpted stone was found by M. du Chatellier “at the end of an avenue marked by two rows of uncut stones.”

  Hewitt moves on quickly to his point. “It was doubtless to this god of time that the earliest stone-altar or sun-gnomon-stone was erected, and similarly the original tree Yupa, the tree-trunk, denoted the god who measured time by the changes . . . of the three seasons. . . . The designs engraved on this stone-altar . . . say as clearly as written words could do, ‘This is an altar to the God of Time who sent the sun-bird of the winter solstice to fly its annual course from South to North and North to South ’round the Pole, and to supply the light and the heat which nourishes the mother-tree of life.’ ”

  Figure 10.1. Designs from A, Basque gravestones, and B, from Hewitt’s mysterious “linga stone.”

  VISHNUNABHI, THE MOTHER, AND THE HERMETIC BROTHERHOOD OF LUXOR

  It is hard to know what to make of Hewitt. From our modern perspective his ideas on languages and migrations strike us as quaint relics of an age when the height of sophistication was a British passport and Britannia ruled the waves of a global empire. In such an age, the pronouncements of an educated Englishman carried a certain weight, and even those he classed as inferior accepted his definitions of culture. It would be more than a generation before Indian scholars would take charge of the study of their own history and languages, and another generation before archaeology caught up to philology and began to supply the missing gaps in the theories of language diffusion and displacement. With that in mind, we can give Hewitt credit for the effort and appreciate his difficulties, while still trying to understand how he arrived at his conclusions.

  It is tempting to see Hewitt’s four ages as the same as the Hindu yuga
s, although Hewitt never makes the comparison. He clearly sees them as precessionally based, and tries to place them within the accepted framework of the astronomical understanding of his era. He cites Sir Norman Lockyer’s 24,400-year length for precession and tries to make his data fit the pattern, even though numerically Hewitt keeps turning up an older pattern based on 72 times 360, for a Great Year of 25,920 years. It is this uncertainty on such a key point that allows us to track Hewitt’s esoteric source.

  In addition to the precessional plan of his four 6,000-year ages, Hewitt has supplied us with a mythic symbolism that encompasses all three of the great alignments—galactic, ecliptic, and celestial—that we examined in chapter 4. Thus, his mythological symbolism combines in a series of overlapping images the ancient secrets of illuminated astronomy, and therefore, as Hewitt implies, the secret of time itself. Hewitt applies this understanding to the past, but, if his timing of the age of Taurus is accurate—and it is within acceptable limits—then we are now at the turn of another age, and the beginning of a new round of four ages.

  That Hewitt does not directly connect his scheme of ages with the four yugas is somewhat surprising. He is aware of Manu, whom he calls the lawgiver to the Minyan race, and cites his 24,000-year period for the yugas, even comparing this to Lockyer’s modern estimate, but he stops short of direct comparison. The reason for this omission is obscure, until we look directly at the numbers Manu gives in his Laws. Adding Hewitt’s pattern of ages, we find that they cover only half, or 12,000 years, of the cycle Manu has proposed. Hewitt avoids the contradiction as unimportant to his major thesis, but if we stop to examine it, we find that it points to what is perhaps the deepest secret of all in the ancient illuminated astronomy, the location and significance of the galactic center.