by Jay Weidner
The problem is that heliacal risings of Venus and Sirius are too common to be used as an indicator of any large period between catastrophes. Following our Tarot trump pattern, the star on the pedestal would be simply The Star, trump 17. Interestingly enough, most Tarot cards of The Star show it as eight-rayed. Its zodiacal attribution is Aquarius, the sign opposite Leo, and its Hebrew letter is heh, the window. From this we can speculate that this star is somehow related to the cycles of time, the dragon axis of the Teli, revealed to Abraham.
Figure 11.8. The sun and star panels seen in transparency, making “the sun behind the sun.”
At first glance, the sun face is indeed a devouring sun as Boucher tells us. Its design is vaguely Mesoamerican, suggesting Aztec or Incan calendrical sun disks. None of our sources draws any attention to this obvious fact. While the angry sun does suggest a catastrophe motif, the more obvious Tarot image for this face is The Sun, trump 19. This card is attributed to Leo, and the Hebrew letter resh, the R of the Lallemant mansion’s enigmatic credence, is its Hebrew letter. Its simple meaning of “completion of a cycle” points to its basic meaning on the monument. The sun will complete a great cycle, perhaps even the great cycle, the monument implies. The sun face is opposite the eight-rayed star, and, as Boucher suggests, there is a numerical connection between them (see fig. 11.9). The star’s rays grow by a geometric progression on the sun face, doubling or crossing from 8 to 16 to 32. Mevryl’s idea of the sun behind the sun is suggestive, for it makes the star a symbol of Sirius. We are given no clue concerning the four stars surrounding the sun. Mevryl does have a few ideas on the stars, including the possibility that they are the inner and outer planets.12
The Moon is the most curious of the images on the pedestal of the Hendaye cross (see fig. 11.10).
It is clearly the storybook man-in-the-moon face, but with a prominent eye. The image is also echoed on the traditional rendition of the Tarot trump called The Moon. This makes the association to the trump easy, but we are left unsure of its meaning. The Moon, trump 18, is the card of illusion and unconscious forces, and it is attributed to Pisces and the Hebrew letter qoph. The Moon is across from the Last Judgment, indicating that it is somehow involved in marking that moment in time. But how? The answer becomes obvious only when we arrange the pedestal’s faces into their Tarot equivalents.
Figure 11.9. The sun superimposed on the star.
Figure 11.10. The moon on the pedestal of the monument.
Fulcanelli focuses most of his discussion on the final image, the four A’s/Last Judgment, because of its undoubted importance. But what exactly is it showing us? Since Fulcanelli is so clear in his insistence that this face is the Last Judgment, we shouldn’t hesitate to examine the traditional image for this trump, which is number 20, for clues. In the oldest versions, an angel with a trumpet sporting an equal-armed cross, such as found on the monument face, resurrects three people from their graves. The angel, perhaps Gabriel, is surrounded by a heavenly radiance, and thirteen rays shoot down toward the newly risen dead. From this we can discern that the Last Judgment is not the Day of Wrath, when the wicked are punished, but rather the beginning of the chiliast millennium.
Fulcanelli’s discussion, however, seems to jump from obvious references to the Last Judgment, reinforcing our Tarot interpretation of this face, to equally obvious references to the last Tarot trump, number 21, The World, whose Hebrew letter is tau and astrological attribution is Saturn. The four archangels are not shown on The Last Judgment trump, but are the principal motif of The World card. Thus, Fulcanelli is telling us that we must include the Tarot trump The World in our interpretation.
Each of the four A’s symbolizes an age of the Great Year, and their broken crossbar is used in printer’s mark code to signify a millennium (see fig. 11.11). From this, we can see that the A’s represent either 4,000 years, taking us back to the time of Abraham, or 12,000 years, Mevryl’s asteroid periodicity, if we think of each A as 3,000 years. Both of these dates are suggestive, but, as we shall find, the 12,000-year date, 10,000 B.C.E., is the most interesting.
The Tarot trump The Last Judgment is also associated with the element of fire—hence, the predictions of being tried by divine fire. If we take Fulcanelli’s suggestion and place the four fixed signs of the zodiac on the four A’s, an interesting pattern emerges. The upper pair would be Leo, the Lion, and Scorpio, the Eagle; below that would be Aquarius, the Water Carrier, and Taurus, the Bull, if we match the pattern on the facade of Arles’ Saint Trophime Cathedral (see fig. 11.2A). The X formed by this arrangement becomes Leo/Aquarius and Scorpio/ Taurus. Since this X is also our Saint Andrew’s cross from the upper part of the monument, we can conclude that the ages are measured from equinox to equinox. The Last Judgment begins when the Great Cross is formed, at the equinox period when Leo/Aquarius forms a right angle with Scorpio/Taurus.
Figure 11.11. Samples of sacred A’s from early French Gnostic watermarks. To the medieval mind, the V-shaped cross stroke of the capital A implied an M as in “Ave Millenarium.” From Harold Bayley, The Lost Language of Symbolism, 2 vols. (New York: Citadel Press, n.d.).
THE MONUMENT SPEAKS: THE SEASON OF THE APOCALYPSE
With all the pieces of the Hendaye puzzle now spread before us, we must make sense of the mystery. Our solution must be self-contained and it must be accurate—that is, capable of interpreting astronomical reality. Only then will the monument’s message be clear and unambiguous.
The upper cross tells us that the Last Judgment is timed to the precessional cycle of the equinoxes, and, whether or not there is a place of refuge, this disaster happens when the precessional dragon axis, also the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, forms a cross or right angle to the Tree of Life, the galactic dragon axis. The pillar, the Djed, reinforces this idea of a precessional alignment with the galactic axis. The base presents a way to refine the timing of this event.
We needed a starting point, however, to begin our calculations. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which preserved some key pieces of the puzzle, supplied the hint that if Leo is put on the spring equinox, the zodiac will align properly.13 If we use the beginning of the Age of Leo, roughly 13,000 years ago, as our starting point, then the monument, once its symbolism is understood, could be made to reveal a date for the beginning of the end of time.
The answer is at once both simple and complex, and it confirms the depth of understanding of the Tree of Life as a cosmological model on the part of Fulcanelli and of the builder of the monument. Starting with the directions, the images on the base, and their Tarot and zodiacal associations we get:
On the monument, the star on the east and the moon on the north together suggest that the northeast corner symbolizes the cusp of Aquarius/Pisces. Opposite is the junction of the sun and the element of fire. We can take this as the cusp of Leo/Virgo, since The Sun trump is attributed to Leo. This forms one of our axes. The northwest/southeast line becomes the Scorpio/Sagittarius–Taurus/Gemini galactic axis, from center to edge, so that our simple arrangement of Tarot attributions, shown in figure 11.12, gives us our correct alignment of the Cube of Space.
If we use as our starting point the moment when the spring equinox fell on the cusp of Leo/Virgo, we arrive at a date of March 22, 10,958 B.C.E. Half a precessional cycle later, 12,960 years, brings us to 2002, when Leo/Virgo falls on the fall equinox. The monument also records this 180-degree rotation of symbols around the galactic axis. In 10,958 B.C.E., the sun rose in the east in Leo/Virgo as the moon set in Aquarius/Pisces. The monument reverses this, with the sun in the west and the moon in the east, to show the flip of precessional midpoints, the Leo/Virgo equinoxes.
Figure 11.12. Correspondence of the Hendaye cross and Tree of Life/Tarot images. The four Tarot trumps, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, and The Last Judgment, represent the four faces of the Hendaye cross. The edges are aligned to the great cross of the galactic alignment, September 22–23, 2002.
If the midpoint of the classically counted G
reat Year really falls on the fall equinox of 2002, then the monument should point directly to that moment in time. The arrangement of the four evangelists or fixed signs in the pattern of the four A’s on the Last Judgment panel supports this alignment, as does the tympanum designs of Arles and Chartres. But to be truly specific, the monument must give us something that precisely defines that moment in time. On the sun face, it does.
The key, of course, is where to stand. Mevryl’s clues suggest that we take Champagne’s frontispiece to Le Mystère literally and stand between the paws of the Sphinx on the Giza plateau. Thanks to the Voyager 2 computer software, we were able to do this prior to the event and check our conclusions. Dawn on September 23, 2002, local Sphinx time, is also close to the moment of the fall equinox, which brings the whole pattern into synchronization.
On that day the sun rose on the cusp of Leo/Virgo, with the near-full moon setting on the cusp of Aquarius/Pisces. As shown in figure 11.13, in the sky as the sun rose on that day were the three superior planets, Mars and Jupiter close together in Leo and Cancer, respectively, and Saturn on the mid-heaven cusp of Gemini/Taurus; below the horizon were the two inferior planets, Venus and Mercury in Virgo and Libra, respectively. This matches the four stars of the pedestal’s sun face, with Mars and Jupiter above the horizon and Mercury and Venus below.
But all three superior planets are visible, for Saturn stands high in the mid-heaven on the cusp of Taurus/Gemini, in opposition to the center of the galaxy. Fulcanelli is aware of this: “The age of iron has no other seal than that of Death. Its hieroglyph is the skeleton, bearing the attributes of Saturn: the empty hourglass, symbol of time run out, and the scythe, reproduced in the figure seven, which is the number of transformation, of destruction, of annihilation.”14
Figure 11.13. Planetary alignment at dawn on the fall equinox, September 22, 2002, with the Sphinx as zero point.
But it is hard to see how this configuration of the planets can be derived from the monument unless we consider the kabbalistic Tree of Life. Even though he insists that the four A’s represent the Last Judgment, Fulcanelli associates the panel with the Tarot trump The World. As we noted above, this suggests that we must somehow include The World in our interpretation.
The answer, of course, is Saturn, the planet associated with the trump The World. In our alignment, Taurus/Gemini falls on the south-east corner, the junction between the star, our first symbol, and the four A’s, our last. It seems a natural continuation of the pattern to insert our extra trump at this juncture, and when we do, the Tarot image matches the pattern in the sky. Saturn does fall on the galactic edge of Taurus/Gemini on our equinox morning, demonstrating the precision of the monument’s timing.
This becomes even clearer when we look at our Tree of Life diagram and note that we have been using the bottom five paths on the Tree (fig. 11.14).
Figure 11.14. The lower paths on the Tree of Life showing the correspondences to the alignments on the Hendaye cross.
The paths are arranged in the same symmetry as the faces of the monument. The star and the sun paths are connected through the sefirah Yesod, as the moon and the Last Judgment are linked through Malkuth, forming the same oppositions as on the monument. The star and the moon, however, are on the same side of the Tree as are the sun and the Last Judgment, creating our main northwest/southeast axis. This interlocking symmetry mirrors the arrangement on the monument, and both seem to circle the middle pillar of the galactic axis. Indeed, with the addition of The World/Saturn on the galactic edge, the attributions of the middle pillar of the Tree of Life are revealed.
Opposite The World through Yesod as we go up the middle pillar is the path of the Tarot trump called Art or Temperance, associated with the zodiacal sign Sagittarius, marker of the center of the galaxy. Thus, our pattern of alignments is as complete as on the Tree if we add Art for the center of the galaxy in the northwest corner. We are not only marking a moment, but also recapitulating the art of alchemy. The Tarot itself has always contained this insight. The image of Art, or Temperance, from the very earliest decks has been full of alchemical motifs. Some decks have even made the connection explicit by calling the trump Alchemy.15
What in the Tarot and on the Tree of Life is a philosophical construct becomes a way to calculate a specific moment in time on the Hendaye monument. In this we are reminded of Fulcanelli’s admonition on the short or dry path—“one single vessel, one single matter, one single furnace”—from his discussion on Saint Marcel’s dragon. Could it be that the short method, the quick transformation, is linked to the quality of time? Does Hendaye record the precise moment when the “dry work” becomes universal or simply happens spontaneously? Could this be Fulcanelli’s double catastrophe?
Once again the Tree of Life and Tarot attributions provide a clue. The trump called The Blasted Tower, attributed to Mars, and whose symbol is a bolt of cosmic lightning striking a castle tower, crosses the path of Art/Alchemy. This image of destruction blocks the path to the center of the galaxy, giving support to the idea of its destructive nature.
The Tarot attributions on the Tree of Life thus tell us the major chiliast secret, that the events at the end of time are also the processes of a universal alchemical transmutation. Art/Alchemy and The Blasted Tower are linked, at right angles on the Tree, in the same way that the Great Cross of the fall equinox in 2002 linked them in the sky, with Mars rising at right angles to the center of the galaxy and Saturn. Could this arrangement be a harbinger of Fulcanelli’s “double cataclysm”?
Fulcanelli, in the Hendaye chapter, is very careful in his choice of disaster words. He begins with chiliasm and “millenarism,” two quaint, almost antiquarian terms. Then he uses “cyclic catastrophe” and proceeds quickly to “the Beast of the Apocalypse, of the dragon, which on the days of Judgment, spews out fire and brimstone on macrocosmic creation.” Soon after, in the same paragraph, Fulcanelli makes his only use of the phrase “double cataclysm,” while discussing the single place of refuge. His care could be taken as a sign that he is warning of something more indefinite than Mevryl’s rock from outer space.
Fulcanelli also tells us that the INRI of the upper cross “corresponds to the schematic image of the cycle shown on the base.” This can either be the four A’s or the four images on the base as a whole—the metaphor works for both. The inner meaning of INRI is nature renewed by fire, and its gematria points to the precessional cycle, which implies a cyclical disaster by means of celestial fire.
“Thus,” Fulcanelli continues, “we have two symbolic crosses, both instruments of the same torture. Above is the divine cross, exemplifying the chosen means of expiation; below is the global cross, fixing the pole of the northern hemisphere and locating the fatal period of this expiation. God the Father holds in his hand this globe, surmounted by this fiery sign.”16 From our work so far, this is easily understood. When the cross in the sky, the galactic alignment made by the first two dragon axes, is completed by the cross on earth, the equinox sunrise on the cusp of Leo/Virgo, then the fiery sign will be seen and the “days of Judgment” will be at hand.
The cross will “fix” the North Pole because, on the equinox, the earth’s tilt, which causes the seasons, will be at the balance point, its “fixed” standstill. And this does in fact locate the “fatal period,” with September 22, 2002, the equinox of the Great Cross, as the midway point of the period. Fulcanelli insists that our hemisphere will be tried by fire, in the same way that fire is used to separate gold from its impurities. In the rest of the chapter, he gives us no further clues to the disaster he is predicting, except that only the elite will survive.
When we assemble Fulcanelli’s clues we find that we are looking for a cyclic catastrophe that is timed to the equinox intersections of the precessional Great Year. It will be a double catastrophe in which the northern hemisphere will be tried or destroyed by fire, seemingly from the mouth of the dragon, or the center of the galaxy. The deepest secret of the mysteries, from Isis to the Tarot tru
mp Art/Alchemy, has been the location of the center of the galaxy.
Even more curious is the fact that Pope Sylvester’s Chroniclers, with the blessing of the Fatimid caliph, established the Order of Our Lady of Zion on Mount Zion at the fall equinox of 1002. One thousand years before the Day of Judgment predicted by the ancient illuminated astronomy and rediscovered by the alchemist pope, that same pope founded an order in Jerusalem that would have far-reaching effects on the history of the next millennium. Pope Sylvester was planning on creating the millennium of peace, ending in the chiliast paradise of the New Jerusalem. Like so many other millenarian visionaries before and since, he began with the historical Jerusalem, his influence provoking first pilgrimages and then the Crusades to control the earthly location of the heavenly kingdom.
Pope Sylvester is the link between the lost wisdom of the ancient world and the monotheistic gnosticism that grew out of it and the Gothic age and Italian Renaissance out of which our modern world developed. With Fulcanelli’s help, it is possible to see the entire current, going back at least two millennia to Alexandrian Egypt. From “Isis the Prophetess” and the gnosticism of the emerging popular religions, to the family groups of Islam and Judaism and the solitary philosophers of the West, down to Pope Sylvester, the Templars, and the builders of the cathedrals, on through the underground centuries of alchemists and Rosicrucians, to its twentieth-century explication by Fulcanelli, the current retained its coherence.
