by Jay Weidner
Mevryl then smoothly jumps to his other, and perhaps more significant, reason for why the cross is at Hendaye: “Immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, the pitifully small remnants of that multi-million-strong civilization reached safety along the shorelines of the Atlantic basin.” Mevryl continues: “[T]hese are the Basques, survivors of the last cyclic catastrophe to overwhelm mankind and who have had a unique tribute to chiliasm set down on their border. Through this strange device, a memory is preserved from Iron Age to Iron Age—nearly 12,000 years.” Mevryl sounds almost as if he were reading from Hewitt, down to the confusion over the length of time from Iron Age to Iron Age.
He continues by using the 12,000-year figure as a one-foot ruler to illustrate that even such a period of time is but a collection of human lives. “The whole span of 12,000 years represents only a series of 192 such lifetimes. Knowledge and teaching transmitted a mere 200 times is hardly inconceivable even to we short-lived creatures.” Mevryl brings this back to Hendaye: “. . . and very close to the zero of today, [we find] the erection of the Cyclic Cross at Hendaye. Here then, is a tribute to the long medley of more-than-human endeavour and an indication that there is an unbroken purpose at work in history. It is also a reasonable point upon the time-scale to place a prediction that time is running out and that the Age is about to end.”
And then Mevryl makes a very revealing and curious comment: “Yet we have here prediction, not prophecy. Prophecy implies seership— long-sightedness, of being accurately informed about future time, coupled with a measure of certainty often not intended by the prophet himself. The Christian Bible is full of prophetic utterances that are for the most part warnings rather than statements of inexorable fact.”
Just as we are absorbing the implications of Mevryl’s distinction between prophecy and prediction, he switches gears and presents us with the biblical “prophecy” found in the thirteenth chapter of Mark’s Gospel. He concludes: “Jesus took a penetrating look into and through our own times to the future events symbolised at Hendaye. We can be reasonably sure that they are in our own times, since He put together a number of more or less simultaneous events that could only occur separately in other epochs.” But even Jesus didn’t know the exact time. Mevryl suggests that any adept could have calculated the rough timing. He points to Nostradamus and the “1999” quatrain, and suggests that Jesus may have known as much as Nostradamus, even if not the exact day and hour.
He then suggests a parallel between an object coming in from deep space and scientists’ inability to predict with much accuracy the fall of Skylab to the earth. He concludes: “It is fair to suggest that the precise timing may be beyond computation.” In this, Mevryl sees a possible hint of a reprieve from the “inexorable fact” of the coming events.
But instead of being explicit, Mevryl quotes two significant passages from the Koran and then shifts to ancient Egypt and speculations on the “Osirian race . . . God-like men rather than gods.” Are they, “perhaps, mentors and directors of terrestrial mankind?” Mevryl questions. From this, he determines that “within the highest levels of prophecy in Holy Writ there remains hope. A hope based upon astronomical realities.”
Mevryl then follows this up by suggesting that there is “a protective power” that has allowed mankind time to develop without destructive collisions from outer space. “In that event,” he continues, “the chiliasm of Hendaye symbolises not absolute prophecy but an accurate prediction based directly upon humanity’s experience over many Ages of cyclic time. Timings can be calculated; manifestations cannot.”
He moves on from this point to his complex interpretation of the separate elements of the cross. While this section is filled with odd clues and equally insightful game playing, it is too extensive to cover in detail here. We shall refer to the important clues and suggestions as we unravel the message of the cross itself, but for now we must get an overview of Mevryl’s thesis.
Whoever Mevryl may in fact be, he presents us in these opening pages a handful of basic truths without which it is impossible to go any further with an understanding of the Hendaye cross. We can summarize them as follows:
The location of Hendaye is critically important, both to the identity of Fulcanelli and in the symbolic sense of a “double teaching.”
The monument is a “prediction” of a specific group of astronomical events that happen separately at other times, but are forming an alignment or arrangement at just the time predicted on the monument.
This arrangement of astronomical events has been used as the traditional marker point of the Day of Judgment mentioned in the Gospel of Mark.
Armed with these important points, it is time to turn to the cross and its unusual symbols. Do they really say what Boucher, Fulcanelli, and Mevryl claim they do? Can we solve the riddles and mysteries left by our three commentators and unravel the true message of the Hendaye cross?
DECIPHERING THE CODE
The effect of reading Fulcanelli’s Hendaye chapter is not unlike that produced by a good conjuring trick, a sort of intellectual now-you-seeit-now-you-don’t. You think Fulcanelli has told you a secret, and he has, but you can’t quite figure out what or how the secret works. All the clues are there, including instructions, but the picture is still confused.
For example, we are told that the monument marks a future catastrophe, and then we are lectured on the evangelical beasts without being given a way to connect these concepts. Fulcanelli is painting a picture that tells the reader, as clearly as he could, that the world is coming to an end.
The unknown builder of the cross also knew that the world was coming to an end, and both Fulcanelli and the unknown builder suggest that they know the cause of the apocalypse. Fulcanelli even says that he knows where the place of refuge is located for the time of the end of the world.
Armed with the clues from Boucher, Fulcanelli, and Mevryl, it’s time to look directly at the monument and let it speak for itself. If it is a marker of some future catastrophe, then exactly how does it tell us this? And, even more important, does it really tell us when?
The monument itself has three basic components: the upper cross, the column or pillar, and the pedestal. The upper cross has three symbolic components, the pillar is its own symbol, and the base has four symbols, for a total of eight symbolic images. We can think of the entire monument as a schematic, or exploded-perspective view, of a single geometrical construct, the Cube of Space of the Bahir’s Precious Stone of the Wise.
As shown in figure 11.3, the three symbolic components of the upper cross are the INRI inscription, the X’s on the top cross, and the oddly broken Latin inscription. These symbols offer us three interrelated meaning systems that, when taken together, give us the key to understanding the entire process symbolized by the monument.
Figure 11.3. The front of the cross at Hendaye.
The pillar stands as a unifying image that brings together the symbolic content of the cross and the base. The pedestal’s four symbols must be taken as a unit, one in which the order and meaning of the symbolic components are in a state of flux, but the nature of the whole is constant. That is, the way the meaning is derived is flexible, but the meaning, as we shall see, remains the same no matter how the sides are read. As shown in figure 11.4, the images on the pedestal, starting in the east and moving counterclockwise, include an eight-rayed starburst and an oddly shaped half moon/boat with a prominent eye. Next comes an angry sun face with bulging spiral eyes, dumbbell-shaped mouth, and prominent chin. Sixteen large spikes and sixteen smaller spikes inside a containing outer circle surround the face. The sun circle itself is surrounded by four stars, placed in the corners of the rectangle and tilted so that their diagonal axes cut through the center point of the sun face. The final image is an oval that fills the entire space of the side and contains a cross with four A’s in it. The A’s are unusual for having a sharply angled crossbar rather than the usual horizontal one.
Figure 11.4. The images of the faces of the pedestal.
After taking each symbolic component in turn, we shall proceed to assembling them into an overall pattern of meaning.
The Upper Cross
The INRI inscription on the upper cross places us firmly within the Rosicrucian alchemical tradition. As Fulcanelli tells us, this inscription can be interpreted as one of the key maxims of alchemy: Igne Natura Renovatur Integra, or “By fire nature is renewed whole.” It is also Igne Nitrum Raris Invenitum, or “The shining is rarely found in fire.” Perhaps a more accurate way to view these four letters is as the initial letters of the Hebrew names of the elements: yam, which is water and the letter yod or I; nur, which is fire and the letter nun or N; ruach, which is air and the letter resh or R; and yebeshas, which is earth and the letter yod or I again. Figure 11.5 shows a complete table of esoteric correspondences.
This quaternity also suggests the Four Ages, one for each of the elements from water to the earth. In the rituals of the Golden Dawn, these Hebrew letters were considered the “key word” and subjected to a sort of gnostic and kabbalistic analysis. After the letters are converted into their Hebrew equivalents of the four elements, they are then given their Yetziratic—that is, their zodiacal and planetary—correspondences: Yod is Virgo; nun is Scorpio; resh is the Sun; and the final yod is Virgo again.7
From this a pattern of the sequence of life, death, resurrection or rebirth, and new life can be abstracted. The Golden Dawn then applied Egyptian god-forms to these concepts: Life is Isis; death is Apophis; resurrection is Osiris. From this they derived the name of the Gnostic high god IAO. These vowels had long been associated with a mysticism of light, as shown by their prominence in the Bahir.8 Note that this arrangement begins and ends with Isis, implying the centrality of the “life” she bestows. We should also keep in mind that another, more Rosicrucian version of INRI can be read as Isis Naturae Regina Ineffabilis, or “Isis, the ineffable Queen of Nature.”
Figure 11.5. A table of INRI correspondences.
In Hebrew gematria, which assigns each letter a numerical value, yod is 10, nun is 50, and resh is 200, making the number of the word equal to 270. The number 270 is one of the precessional numbers, for multiplied by 8, the number of all the symbols on the monument, the product equals 2,160, the number of solar cycles in one precessional month (12 × 2160 = 25,920 years, or one complete precessional cycle or Great Year).
Therefore, our first symbol tells us of a basic elemental pattern, that of life, death, resurrection, and new life, which is related to the mysteries of light, the “Fire where the shining can be found,” and the precessional cycle caused by the earth’s tilted axis. The Bahir suggests that the tilted axis is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or that which gives each age its quality.
There are two X’s on the upper cross, on the opposite side from the INRI inscription. The lower one is the middle X of the Latin inscription, so that these two X’s are stacked one on top of the other. The first impression is that of the Roman numeral twenty written sideways. Fulcanelli goes to great lengths to call our attention to them without giving the most obvious correspondence, that of trump 20 (or XX) of the Tarot, The Last Judgment. He does tell us that he already knew the meaning of the upper cross from looking at the images on the pedestal, where the Last Judgment is indeed portrayed.
Fulcanelli is not being misleading here, for the snake of the ecliptic, the curving shape the path of the sun makes in its yearly round, is an important piece of the puzzle, even if it is nowhere else attributed to the Greek letter chi. As shown in figure 11.6, the pattern formed by the two X’s on top of each other is indeed a diagram of the ecliptic snake, with the cross mark of the X’s showing the equinoxes.
This symbol tells us that the Last Judgment is the time when the elements, described by the INRI inscription, align in the right way, and X marks the spot on the equinoxes.
Figure 11.6. The ecliptic snake formed from combining the two X’s.
Turning to the Latin inscription, the obvious meaning, “Hail, O Cross, the Only Hope,” should not be discarded, for the phrase also refers to the crossing pattern of the equinoxes and the alignment of the ecliptic and the galactic meridian. But the odd split in the middle of the inscription does suggest a riddle. Given Fulcanelli’s insistence that the X be read as an S or a snake, it is curious that spes backward is seps, Latin for “venomous serpent.” Reading this word backward in translating the inscription produces “Hail, O Cross, the Only Snake (or Serpent).” Perhaps this is another reference to the ecliptic or to the snakelike motion that the Milky Way makes as the year progresses. The word pes, or foot, is clearly shown, although, as Fulcanelli notes, unica does not agree with it in gender. If we transpose two letters in unica, however, we get uncia, meaning “twelfth part,” and the phrase can be translated as “Hail, O Cross, the measure of the twelfth part.” If we look at the top line of the inscription, we are left with two letters that are not really needed, the O and the S. Putting these together at the beginning of the sentence gives us the Latin word OS, “bone” and also “inmost part” or “essence.” The phrase then becomes Os crux ave pes uncia, or “The essential cross salutes the measure of the twelfth part.” We can also read it as Os crux ave spes/seps unica, or “The essence of the cross salutes the only hope/snake.”
From all of these options, and without complicated anagrammatic play, we get an immediate complex of meanings. Just from a glance at the inscription, we can tell that the secret concerns an equinox cross, the cross of the ecliptic and the galaxy and a snake that somehow measures the twelfth part, the last inch of Mevryl’s 12,000-year ruler. The inscription is telling us that the monument is a way to measure when the snake and the crosses coincide. It also suggests that this knowledge is our only hope.
The Pillar
The pillar is the single symbol that unifies the whole vision. It is simultaneously the World Axis, the spine of the world, the World Tree, and the Tree of Life. It is also the Egyptian Djed column, the backbone of Osiris, which was also thought of as the polar axis of the planet and the galactic meridian.9 It is the stable axis through the center of the galaxy that anchors the moving axis of the precession of the equinoxes. It also represents the Teli from the Bahir. The Egyptians celebrated a realignment of the Djed pillar every 27, 54, and 108 years.10 These are, of course, numbers involved in the precession of the equinoxes, reduced by a factor of ten. The Djed, then, was also seen as a marker of a particular time, the beginning and end of a long cycle.
The central pillar of the cross at Hendaye, in suggesting that it has a Djed-like function, possibly points to the precessional realignment, of the Egyptian temples and of life itself, with the galactic axis. As the connecting concept between the symbolic meaning of the upper cross and how this meaning is played out in the multileveled cross of the base, the pillar has been conspicuous in its absence. None of our sources bothers to mention it. After all, the monument doesn’t need a pillar. Even if the upper cross rested on the base, it could still be seen as above and not change the meaning. Direct mention of the column was not included for a reason, for it symbolizes the Djed-like cosmic alignment the monument is describing. Not even Fulcanelli felt comfortable drawing attention to its symbolic implications.
The Base or Pedestal
Given Fulcanelli’s identification of the double X’s on the upper cross with one of the images on the base, we can only surmise that the image of the four A’s was indeed meant to represent Tarot trump 20, The Last Judgment. There are no clues about what Tarot cards correspond to the star, the moon, and the sun, images that Fulcanelli does not comment on at all. As noted above, he does, however, go on at great length about the fourfold attributes of the Last Judgment, insisting that we pay attention to the four evangelists and their animal forms. Fortunately, all of these symbols relate to the monument as a whole as much or more than they relate to the four A’s of the Last Judgment, and they give us an important clue about how to use the monument as a galactic marker.
To understan
d this, we must first of all locate the monument and its symbols in space. Fulcanelli tells us that the front of the monument is the side with the INRI inscription. This is also the side of the pedestal that has the star, and it faces east. The sun faces west, the moon faces north, and the Last Judgment, the four A’s, faces south.
Now let’s look at each symbol individually. As figure 11.7 shows, our three sources have each suggested a different pattern for ordering the images on the pedestal. Boucher proposed a zigzag, Fulcanelli a clockwise circle, and Mevryl a counterclockwise circle, and we must be careful not to lose sight of their intrinsic interconnectedness.
Figure 11.7. Three analysis patterns of the images on the base.
Because the star is on the side that faces east, one might tend to think of it as the Morning Star, Venus, but also Sirius. Both of these are intriguing attributions, pointing as they do toward Isis, the Egyptian goddess who was the model for the Christian Mary. Isis was linked to Sirius in Egypt. Her husband, Osiris, was thought to be the constellation Orion, which Sirius follows at a respectful distance. Sirius was also used as a time-keeping star in ancient Egypt. Its rise before the sun, as the Morning Star, marked the annual flooding of the Nile. Venus can also be used as a time-keeping marker, one whose periodicity can be used to track the precessional motion.11 Neither of these options, however, seems to fit the meaning on the monument. Given the monument’s current alignment, we can’t help but stand in the west looking east through the rising sun toward the eight-rayed starburst, which suggests some sort of heliacal rising. (To see this we must imagine the base as transparent, as shown in fig. 11.8.)
