The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  A contemporary of Hewitt’s, Swami Sri Yukteswar, was at the forefront of the late-Victorian movement in India to reclaim and update its ancient spiritual heritage. At that time, there were still forest sages, such as Yukteswar’s guru Mahavatar Babaji, who practiced the ancient Vedic sciences, and in the face of the imperial raj’s inroads on Indian culture a reaction developed in which the ancient wisdom would be vindicated and revived by means of the Western sciences of history, philology, and astronomy. Sri Yukteswar stood at the forefront of this movement, which would eventually see such strange mixtures as Mahatma Gandhi and Annie Besant, and his influence, through his student Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship and author of the classic Autobiography of a Yogi, has been profound and far-reaching.

  Sri Yukteswar, in his book The Holy Science, attempts to address the problem with Manu’s dates. His basic idea is that while a complete cycle is 24,000 years, it has two expressions, each 12,000 years long; and following Manu’s pattern, both converge on the point where, according to Yukteswar, the sun is at its closest point to “this grand center, the seat of Brahma,” and again 12,000 years later at the point where the sun is farthest away from the “seat of Brahma.” This grand center is called “Vishnunabhi, which is the seat of the creative power, Brahma, the universal magnetism.”10

  Modern Vedic scholars, such as David Frawley, clearly identify Vishnunabhi with the center of the galaxy. In Astrology of the Seers, he comments: “The galactic center is called ‘Brahma,’ the creative force, or ‘Vishnunabhi,’ the navel of Vishnu. From this galactic sun emanates the light which determines the life and intelligence on Earth.”11 John Major Jenkins, in his book Galactic Alignment, goes even further: “Without mincing words, it is clear that the ancient Vedic skywatchers were aware of the galactic center, and, indeed considered it to be the center and source of creative power in the universe.”12

  Jenkins also remarks: “[T]he critical information encoded in Yukteswar’s book—written decades before the Galactic Center was officially discovered in the 1920s—is that the ancient Vedic yuga doctrine was calibrated with the periodic alignments of the solstice sun and the galactic center.”13 Frawley agrees, and asserts that all of Vedic astrology “orients the zodiac to the galactic center.” The lunar mansions of Vedic astrology also point to the region of the galactic center, six degrees Sagittarius. The thirteen-degree lunar sign that includes the galactic center is called mulla, or root, indicating the importance of the center of the galaxy as the source and origin of life and time.14

  Hewitt is referring to this tradition, although obliquely, with his comments: “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. . . .”15 The arc of movement toward and away from the galactic center is indicated by the “sun-bird of the winter solstice” who flies from “South to North,” or from the point closest to the galactic center to the point farthest away. The pole it is “circling” is the galactic axis, from Vishnunabhi to the edge of the galaxy, and as the Vedic sages suggest, it does bring the Light that nourishes the “mother-tree” of the ecliptic axis. By Hewitt’s reckoning, the stone “linga” he describes is a physical summation of his precessional mythology, an object that identifies the mystery of time and evolution as the symbolic union or alignment of all three centers and cosmic dragon axes.

  Did Hewitt learn his precessional mythology from such Vedic reconstructionists as Sri Yukteswar or did he intuit it from the original sources? Both of these seem somewhat unlikely. Sri Yukteswar’s work, The Holy Science, was not available in the West until 1949, and the date of its composition is uncertain. Hewitt may have heard of such teachings, but if he did, he does not mention them as sources. Also, even though his grasp of Sanskrit is quite sound, Hewitt often overlooks important sources and implications. We have seen this in his treatment of Manu, and there are many other examples. We can safely assume, then, that since Hewitt draws on so many non-Vedic sources to support his theme, he did not find his mythology completely within his Indian sources.

  So where did it come from? The answer to that question can be found in the work, sixty years after Hewitt’s book, of a disciple of another Hindu saint intent on reconstructing ancient Vedic wisdom with a Western spin. Sri Aurobindo spent his early life in England, graduating from Cambridge in 1892 and returning to India the next year as a civil servant. He quickly educated himself in Sanskrit and other modern Indian languages and by 1902 was deeply involved in political activity. In 1910, under legal and political pressure for his outspoken support of swaraj, or Indian independence, Aurobindo went into a spiritual retirement and departed Bengal for Pondicherry in French India.

  A group developed around Aurobindo, including a young married Frenchwoman by the name of Mirra Alfassa, who rapidly became Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual mate. She was simply called the Mother, and was seen by the community as an incarnation of the divine presence.

  In 1968, eighteen years after Sri Aurobindo’s death and only five years before her own death, the Mother began a major series of building projects at Auroville, as the expanding commune at Pondicherry was called. One of these was something called the Matrimandir.

  The Mother worked closely with another young Frenchwoman, Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet, on the design and symbolism of the Matrimandir, a shrine intended to symbolize the godhead on earth. As John Major Jenkins points out in Galactic Alignment, the Matrimandir, like Hewitt’s linga altar stone, is a combination of all three cosmic centers and axial directions in a single symbolic object. Although the completed structure didn’t follow the Mother’s precise geometrical specifications, and therefore failed in its initiatory intent, the descriptions and conclusions Norelli-Bachelet preserves for us in her works The Gnostic Circle and The New Way clearly point to the importance of the center of galaxy, and its periodic precessional alignments, for our spiritual evolution.

  “We can go so far,” Norelli-Bachelet instructs us, “as to know that there is a great Centre to which we in our system are related and which holds the key to the Precession of the Equinoxes. It is this Centre that makes the axis Capricorn and Cancer the Evolutionary Axis of our planet. And through our study we can know that in ourselves, in our very bodies, we can find the exact reproduction of this galaxy which then gives us the revelation of the Supreme Herself.” Her “Evolutionary Axis,” given as the tropicalc signs of Capricorn and Cancer—Sagittarius and Gemini in sidereal terms—is, of course, the galaxy axis from center to edge. Jenkins suggests that Norelli-Bachelet derived this axis from the works of René Guénon, but the chances are that Norelli-Bachelet learned it directly from the Mother, who in fact seems to have learned from the same source as Guénon.16 And, even more curiously, the Mother and Guénon’s sources lead us back, indirectly, to Hewitt.

  Mirra Alfassa, the Mother, is in her own right one of the most fascinating figures in twentieth-century occultism. Long before she moved to India and met Sri Aurobindo, Mirra was seeking sources of esoteric wisdom. In 1906, five years after Hewitt published his masterwork, Mirra found her first master, Max Théon, founder of the hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Théon, to whom we shall return later, was by all accounts an amazing individual, and the only spiritual exemplar of the era that earned René Guénon’s admiration. The Mother, who was also not lavish in her praise, calls him a man of enormous occult power, knowledge, and perception. But the Mother was even more impressed with his wife, Mary Christine Woodruffe Ware, a renowned psychic before she married Théon. Mrs. Théon, née Woodruffe, was the sister of another Sanskrit scholar, Indian civil servant, and Victorian mystic, “Arthur Avalon,” or Sir John Woodruffe.17

  At the same time, 1907, that Mirra Alfassa was learning occultism from Théon, Woodruffe was writing Hewitt looking for information on Tantric texts in Bengal. Woodruffe and Hewitt apparently became friends, as the anonymous re
view of Hewitt’s last book, Primitive Traditional History, in the journal Nature was actually written by Woodruffe. Woodruffe’s books, published under the pen name Arthur Avalon, began to appear in the early 1910s and continued into the 1920s, and they remain influential in modern mystical circles.

  While Woodruffe knew Hewitt and knew Théon, we have no direct evidence that Hewitt knew Théon. Yet the indirect evidence can be found in the expressions of other people such as the Matrimandir of the Mother, who certainly knew Théon, and in the very interesting uncertainty over the precise length of the precessional year we mentioned above. Hewitt is trying to make his evidence for a longer precessional period of 25,920 years fit within a framework of 24,000 years, composed of four 6,000-year ages. And this same confusion recurs in T. H. Burgoyne’s Light of Egypt, which was derived, somewhat loosely, from the original teachings of the hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Although Burgoyne confuses different kinds of years, and even invents a few new kinds, à la Hewitt, he correctly states that the 12,000-year period of the Great Age is actually “the motion of the earth’s center (the sun) through space, around a still greater center,” echoing both Hewitt and the Mother, and then follows up in another direction by using the larger period of 25,920 years.

  THE MYSTERY OF THE STONE ALTAR

  While this doesn’t conclusively prove that Hewitt’s mystical leanings were fueled by contact with the hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, the connection, as we shall see later, is very suggestive. More problematic, however, is the origin of the mysterious linga altar that Hewitt describes. This is his key piece of physical evidence, and, as we saw above, it is, at least as Hewitt interprets it, a summation of the cosmic axes and centers in the same manner as the Mother’s Matrimandir. But as our research on this subject went deeper, a most curious enigma developed.

  Pierre du Chatellier, in whose house Hewitt examined this linga stone, was in fact the leading archaeologist of megalithic Britanny, with many published papers to his credit. In 1894, he excavated a Neolithic tumulus, or mound, at the end of a much older row of standing stones, and he found an omphalos-like marker stone. In 1896 he published his results, and in his published monograph we find that the marker was devoid of any carvings at all. Chatellier did not excavate any other tumuli that match Hewitt’s description, and nowhere in his monographs does he describe any stone with the carvings mentioned by Hewitt. Indeed, Neolithic stones with any carving similar to those described by Hewitt are so rare as to be nonexistent. At least none has been found to date. Carvings, of the nature Hewitt describes, belong to a much more recent time, perhaps even down to the historical period, not to the Neolithic or megalithic era.

  But unless we are prepared to claim that Hewitt simply made it up, he must have seen something at the Château Kernuz. Hewitt was there apparently after 1896, the published date of Chatellier’s article, and before 1900, when the book went to the publisher. Could there have been another stone, one not excavated by Pierre du Chatellier, that Hewitt examined and interpreted? And if so, where did it come from?

  Following the basic designs Hewitt describes brings us back to Basque country. Marker stones, similar to Hewitt’s linga, are common throughout the Basque region, complete with crosses and sun wheels, Hewitt’s female swastikas. Could his linga have come from the Basque country? From his comments, Hewitt obviously never connected it with the Basques, even though he considers them to be related to the Neolithic Gothic Celts who he thought had carved the linga stone on a Vedic basis. If he had known the stone’s true origin, he would certainly have made much more of it than he did. After his linga example, Hewitt never again mentions the Basques.

  In one of those research synchronicities that suddenly connects what were until then widely separated pieces of the puzzle, we came across the solution to this minor mystery and found that it led us back to the heart of Le Mystère, the Cyclic Cross of Hendaye. With that solution in hand, we were finally able to answer the question of why, if the Hendaye chapter was written in the mid-1920s, it was not included in Le Mystère until the second, 1957 edition. And that solution pointed us even deeper into the mystery of Fulcanelli’s identity.

  “Leaving the station, a country road, skirting the railway line, leads to the parish church, situated in the middle of the village,” Fulcanelli comments in the Hendaye chapter.

  This church, with its bare walls and its massive, squat rectangular tower, stands in a square a few steps above ground level and bordered by leafy trees. It is an ordinary, dull building, which has been renovated and is of no particular interest. However, near the south transept there is a humble stone cross, as simple as it is strange, hiding amidst the greenery of the square. It was formerly in the parish cemetery and it was only in 1842 that it was brought to its present site near the church. At least, that is what was told me by an old Basque man, who had for many years acted as sexton. As for the origin of this cross, it is unknown and I was not able to obtain any information at all about the date of its erection. However, judging by the shape of the base and the column, I would not think that it could be before the end of the seventeenth or beginning of the eighteenth century.18

  This is all that Fulcanelli tells us concerning the origins of the cross at Hendaye, and it is as misleading as his preceding comment that Hendaye has nothing to interest “the tourist, the archaeologist or the artist.” The date of 1842 for the placement of the cross in the churchyard points directly to the local d’Abbadie family, who purchased the headland in that year and paid for the renovations to the church. The current sexton, who may be the grandson or great-grandson of the one to whom Fulcanelli spoke, quite clearly knows that the cross was moved and placed by the d’Abbadie family, so it is hard to believe that Fulcanelli’s sexton didn’t also have that information. Yet Fulcanelli doesn’t mention it.

  According to the history of the Château d’Abbadie that was published by the Cape Science Foundation, several carved “Basque headstones” were discovered at the site of the château during its construction. These remained for years on the grounds, displayed in a small garden, until they were sent to the foremost megalithic archaeologists of the era for study in 1896, two years before Antoine d’Abbadie died.

  The archives at the Château d’Abbadie, which is now open to the public as a museum, describe one piece has having a Basque sun wheel, several crosses, and a directional “wind rose.” This piece, according to the archives, was sent to Pierre du Chatellier, of the Château Kernuz in Britanny, in late 1896 at the request of M. d’Abbadie. It was never returned, apparently, because there is no further record of it in the archives of the Château d’Abbadie.19 The “wind rose” is specific enough for us to be sure that this stone, from the headland at Hendaye, was in fact the linga Hewitt was describing. His eight-rayed star in a square is most clearly seen as a kind “wind rose” or compass marker for the four directions and their quarters. As the Basques were sailors, this symbolism seems appropriate, and serves to clinch our identification.

  Hewitt’s altar stone, his object that sums up the alignment of the three axes and the three centers, originally stood on an isolated plateau overlooking the sea at Hendaye. It is perhaps the original model from which the seventeenth-century craftsman composed the cross at Hendaye. Hewitt’s stone, and his oddly derived and very esoteric interpretation of it, serves as a kind of touchstone, one that shows up the true “gold,” as we work our way through the different views of the cross.

  The d’Abbadie connection presents us with a solid fact, that the d’Abbadie family was responsible for placing the cross in the churchyard, which Fulcanelli is at pains to avoid mentioning. Even with his careful avoidance, the date of 1842 would have led any reader or researcher in 1926 straight to the family. Exactly what revealing the d’Abbadie family’s involvement with the Hendaye cross would have disclosed is a subject that will have to wait until after we have examined both our three commentaries on the cross, by Boucher, Fulcanelli, and “Paul Mevryl,” and the cross itself. Once we understand
the cross’s message, then we can return to the mystery of what this connection, and its obscuration, tells us about the real Fulcanelli. But first we must examine the three perspectives on the cross that comprise the Hendaye myth.

  ELEVEN

  THE MESSAGE OF THE GREAT CROSS AT HENDAYE

  TRIANGULATING THE MYTH AND THE MESSAGE

  In attempting to decipher the cross at Hendaye’s mythic meaning, we can draw on three different but interrelated interpretations or viewpoints. Along with Fulcanelli’s chapter on the cross in Le Mystère, we have Jules Boucher’s 1936 article in Consolation and Paul Mevryl’s epilogue to The Fulcanelli Phenomenon. These perspectives act like lenses, some microscopic, some telescopic, some as distorting as a fun-house mirror, but before we turn to the monument we need to review these viewpoints with care. Even the distortions, we shall find, can offer us valuable information. So let us examine them in chronological order.

  Jules Boucher’s 1936 article is our first glimpse of the monument to the end of time (see fig. 1.4). According to the article, a M. Lemoine, a painter of “great talent,” gave Boucher some vacation photographs of the cross and thereby brought the monument to Boucher’s attention. A search of French artists of the period turns up no Lemoines. The name Lemoine, which is simply French for “the monk,” is not very common, which leads us to suspect that it is a pseudonym.

  Boucher quotes Fulcanelli in the article, but does not connect him directly to Hendaye. He quotes from Fulcanelli’s Dwellings of the Philosophers about the symbolism of the Saint Andrew’s cross, a quote that echoes Hewitt’s comments. The article begins with a description of the cross. Boucher lists the points that interest him—the four faces of the base, the Latin inscription, the INRI, and the Saint Andrew’s cross above the inscription—and then he plunges immediately into an interpretation of the inscription. As we noted in chapter 1, Boucher’s attempt shows some familiarity with Fulcanelli’s interpretation and method. Boucher, however, stops short of revealing the complete decipherment, appearing in fact to veer off in an odd direction.