The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  The cornerstone of the greater mystery is the cross at Hendaye, a true monument to the end of time. From this simple, inelegant, and obscure monument, Fulcanelli derives his warning that our hemisphere will be tried by fire as well as his message of hope that there is a place of refuge. Our detailed decoding revealed that the monument does indeed suggest the mechanism of the double catastrophe, and it demonstrates that the ancient illuminated science of astro-alchemy creates an astronomically correct Cube of Space within the projected Tree of Life. This illuminated astronomy makes use of sophisticated alignments between the galactic core and the solar system’s angular momentum to its radial energy flow. It also supplies us with a pattern that can be used to locate precisely our solar system in intergalactic space. Contemplating the source of this advanced cosmological knowledge gives us a glimpse of the greater mystery.

  The cross at Hendaye uses this ancient illuminated astronomy to predict the timing of the double catastrophe. Its symbolism reveals a season of destruction from summer solstice to winter solstice over a twenty-year period by pointing to its midpoint, the fall equinox of 2002, when the planetary and solar alignments formed a right-angled cross between our system’s angular momentum and the galactic center. As we have seen, the equinox midpoint is bracketed by celestial events on the solstice, the most prominent of which is the heliacal rising of the sun and the galactic center on the winter solstice of 2012. As this is the end date of the Mayan calendar and a significant date in the Tibetan Kalachakra, its importance takes on added significance. Yet it is the cross as a symbol and a metaphor that has universally held man’s attention.

  The INRI above the starburst on the eastern face of the cross demonstrates how closely Christianity is related to the mystery of the Last Judgment. Maybe, however, given the reading of INRI of “Isis Naturae Regina Ineffabilis,” or “Isis, the Ineffable Queen of Nature,” we ought to adjust our understanding of Christianity to reflect a more Egyptian perspective.

  Perhaps the stories of the birth of a savior are symbolic references to a transformative time. Horus is born to avenge his father Osiris’s death at the hands of his uncle Seth. This strange familial motif is carried through in literature and legends such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Greek Oedipus tragedies, the myths of Jason, and dozens more. What if these myths reflect the conditions in the sky thousands of years ago, at the time of the last catastrophe? And what if these myths are about to reappear in the skies of our time?

  We can see this most clearly when we contemplate chiliasm’s source, the New Jerusalem of Revelation. In chapter 21, verse 10, John tells us that the angel “showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” This suggests that the Holy City is a pattern in the heavens first, before it becomes a reality on earth. Since the Holy City, as the angel reveals in 21:16, is a vast cube, we can easily see this as the Cube of Space. The millennial moment, the climax and end of time, is the moment when the Cube of Space becomes the Holy City of the New Jerusalem.

  This happens, of course, when the celestial markers—sun, moon, planets, edge, and center of the galaxy—assume their appropriate mythological positions, which occurs once every 13,000 years. At that moment, the Cube of Space becomes animated and the heavenly city descends. The cross at Hendaye tells us that we are in the moment now. Only at this point in time, a twenty-year season marked by the midpoint that occurred at the fall equinox of 2002, do the alignments of the Cube of Space and the Tree of Life match the reality in the sky.

  John Michell, in his seminal work City of Revelation, demonstrates that the sacred geometry of the New Jerusalem provides a link between various sacred structures, such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid, and the basic ratio of the moon’s orbit around the earth.1 Taking this as a clue, we can imagine that the cube of the New Jerusalem forms within the sphere defined by the moon’s orbit. It would, of course, be aligned to the larger Cube of Space defined by the celestial events. This cube-within-a-cube image is a three-dimensional representation of a hypercube, the four-dimensional structure formed from the Cube of Space by projecting the Tree of Life onto its surface.

  The phases of the mythological drama, the death of Osiris, the birth of Horus, and his triumph, like the phases of the alchemical transformation, represent the manifestations of the different celestial events forming the New Jerusalem cube and their spiritual consequences for the human psyche. If we assume that the Holy City is complete between 1992 and 2012, then it does indeed look like Revelation is specifically describing the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Perhaps all the horrors of our times are the result of a cosmological alchemy in which the transfiguration of time triggers other transformations. It is possible that we are being pushed by cosmological events toward extinction or enlightenment as a species.

  Paul LaViolette’s work suggests that the mechanism of the double cataclysm could be the arrival of a galactic-core superwave, which would push dust into the sun, causing a massive coronal discharge. This double catastrophe is loosely tied to the precessional cycles, which the ancient illuminated astronomy measured by galactic-core alignments. Perhaps the alignments, such as depicted on Hendaye, occur before the arrival of the superwave and its destructive effects, as a kind of warning, the signs and portents Revelation promises in the sky. It could also be a window of opportunity for profound change, perhaps even the moment of ascension or the mass attainment of the Diamond Body, an immortal light body described in Tibetan Buddhism.

  However we interpret the cosmic mythology, it is the oddly divided Latin inscription on the Hendaye cross that provides us with important clues; it confirms the timing of the catastrophe and then, most signifi-cantly, points to the location of a possible place of refuge. If we pass Fulcanelli’s test and learn to search for the missing refuge within the “space” of the misplaced S, we find a precise location, Cusco, Peru, the Incas’ analog to the center of the galaxy, their “navel of the world.” Following this clear message, we stumbled upon the original location of Atlantis, our lost pre-catastrophe global civilization, and, from the inherited wisdom of its descendants, including the Incas, we discovered the importance of the celestial cross in the southern sky.

  Andean traditions tell of a culture hero, Viracocha, who emerged from the center of the world and gathered the remnants of civilization together at Tiahuanaco, one of the ruined cities of Atlantis. Perhaps this is a memory of the survivors of the last catastrophe and their determination to rebuild their culture. The mysterious Raimondi stela found in the Peruvian highlands and dating to at least 1000 B.C.E. depicts a Viracocha-type shaman. In this image (fig. 13.1), the Viracocha shaman is shown with his internal centers aligned with their planetary equivalents while engaged in surveying stellar alignments with a pair of serpententwined staffs.

  Figure 13.1. The Raimondi stela, left, viewed right side up, is a human figure in an elaborate headdress; right, viewed upside down, the figure appears as a dragon with a large gaping mouth.

  When we stand back and look at this vast panorama of connections and correspondences, the conclusions, strange as they may seem, are obvious. A high civilization existed in the Andes around 15,000 B.C.E. It was perhaps even far beyond our current level. A catastrophe destroyed that culture, except for isolated pockets of survivors. It is possible that some of these “survivors” were actually immortal beings who had attained a “light body” before the wave of destruction arrived. Whatever their exact nature, these beings worked for thousands of years to restart civilization from the ground up, perhaps literally.

  The Viracocha shaman and his surveying staffs suggest that part of the revival had to do with reestablishing a kind of geomantic structure, aligned to the stars, the planets, and other galactic locations, that encouraged life and consciousness. Given that the geometry of both Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid is related to the New Jerusalem cube that is now forming in the sky, we might expect that the idea of an earth grid, Plato’s spherical icosadodecahedron of triangles, would provide more con
firmation of this structure.

  And indeed it does. A mirror image of the structure of Notre-Dame-de-Paris’s choir/apse (fig. 13.2) forms a perfect icosadodecahedron-grid pattern, indicating a connection between the cathedral’s building and the earth grid. Even more intriguing, the long ley line through central England, which passes through Stonehenge and Avebury—two ancient sky temples, complete in Avebury’s case with serpents—also passes through Tiahuanaco. Most curious of all, however, is the occurrence of an essentially interactive phenomenon along this ley line across England—the crop circles.

  Figure 13.2. Mirror symmetry of the apse of Notre-Dame-de-Paris produces the icosadodecahedron pattern of the earth’s grid.

  For thousands of years, “spirits” had been making simple circles in the grain of southern England. Children played in the fairy circles, and the farmers left them alone, figuring the little folk had claimed their share of the crop.2 All that changed in the 1970s, when the phenomenon was discovered by “anomaly hunters” and the media. As more people became interested, and began tramping over the fields and camping out waiting for a glimpse of the circle makers, the designs grew more complex and involved. By the early 1990s, it was obvious that something very unusual was going on.

  The 1999 vintage of crop circles included images that were startlingly close to the core of the astro-alchemical secret (see fig. 13.3). One was a perfect four-circle overlapping geometric structure of the Tree of Life. The Tree itself had appeared in 1996, but 1999 also saw several complex designs based on the Cube of Space. Most startling of all was the design that depicted an approaching object engulfing the sun, causing an eruption.3 Perhaps the Viracocha cult programmed these interactive localities to teach us our cosmic geometry and warn us of the danger. Perhaps the Viracocha cult survived in other forms as well. If they were truly immortal, even if only in the form of the circle makers, then they might still be out there, trying to help us make the transition and survive the catastrophe.

  As suggestive as the crop circles, their makers, and their message might be of the greater mystery, however, they have yet to provide us with more than tantalizing possibilities, and, as usual with the paranormal, more questions than answers. They do at least present us with a new spin on “green language,” a geometric language written in the “green” of the grain fields. But without a broader perspective, this “langue vert” remains incomprehensible and elusive. The circle makers have provided a text, but what is missing is the suitable mythological host, a framework of myth and experience, some of it psychic, that “explains” the interaction between reality and the numinous.

  At the primal level, there are two realities, earth and sky, and they form the foundation of our understanding of space and, as a result of that spatial understanding, time. As soon as a culture or a civilization attains a certain level of awareness, it recapitulates for itself a cosmogony, a description of the origins of the cosmos. One of the earliest of which we have any record, and in many ways one of the most complex, is the ancient creation myth of Heliopolis, the Egyptian city of On.4

  Figure 13.3. A selection of crop-circle designs from 1999, the geometry of which is suggestive of the Cube of Space and the aligning of celestial bodies.

  In the virtual cosmic ocean of Nun, the Atum, whose name means “not to be” as well as “complete (unto itself),” slumbered in a lotus bud. By an act of will, Atum emerged from the virtual “not to be” into the completeness of manifestation, becoming in the process “Re,” or the portal of existence, symbolized by the sun. The hieroglyph for re is a vesica piscis, the vibrating string of a standing wave function out of which, by the process of transformation, all things are created. This image became the “sun” in the sense of the primal source of light and energy (see fig. 13.4).

  Atum-Re, the complete portal of existence, generated the first two polar qualities or attributes: heat, Tefnut, and moisture, Shu. They in turn created Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky. Atum-Re learned that the sky and the earth had been indulging in a sexual dalliance and dispatched Shu to separate them. Nut was thrust upward, arching overhead as the starry sky, her arms and legs becoming the four pillars of the heavens. Geb, in longing for her, thrusts upward mountains in an effort to reach her. To prevent any more such shenanigans, Atum-Re decreed that Nut, the sky goddess, could not conceive during any month of the solar year.

  Figure 13.4. Egyptian hieroglyphics of the name Re with simplified meanings.

  However, the god of time, Tehuti, or Thoth (see fig. 13.5), had a different idea. While Atum-Re represents a solar view of space ordering time, Thoth represents a more lunar or biological view of time inhabiting space. Realizing that a primeval universe of quintessential ordering was also static and unchanging, Thoth played a strange game of proto-chess or checkers—Thoth was said to have invented the use of eight-by-eight, the magic square of Mercury, game boards—with the Moon, an aspect of himself, and won a seventy-second part of its light. From this “artificial light,” Thoth created five days that did not belong to any of the months in the 360 days of Atum-Re’s solar year. On these days, Geb and Nut had their romantic encounters, producing a new quintessence, that of the metaphorical “Neters,” or forces: Osiris, Isis, Horus (the elder), Seth, and Nephthys.

  In this tale we can also see another pair of opposites, the static solar time and the dynamic precessional time, measured by the Egyptians in terms of four lunar-eclipse cycles of roughly seventy-two years. These are the games of chess Thoth played with the Moon and “won,” perhaps by landing on, and thereby predicting, the eclipses. From this very early cosmogony, we can determine that time and timekeeping went beyond merely tracking the local solar and lunar changes; indeed, they were derived from the larger celestial motion of precession. These changes in the larger mystery of the mythic sky had practical and ritual significance for the ancient societies that incorporated them into their mythic structures.

  Figure 13.5. Thoth, keeper of time.

  This is the somewhat sweeping claim made by the most comprehensive look at the subject of stellar myths since Hewitt’s History and Chronology. In 1969, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend published Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time,5 in which they argued that the geography of myth is actually that of the heavens and that the world of the mythic imagination is the whole of the cosmos. In this view, precession is the cause of a series of successive catastrophes as each group of constellations marking an Age falls away from its solstice or equinox marker point, and these catastrophes are assimilated within a framework of mythic events that give them meaning within the culture.

  Santillana and von Dechend identified the mythic geography, its roads, oceans and rivers, and, most significant, its trees and poles, as components of the sky, the Milky Way, and the celestial axis. We saw how the Christianized Incas of Misminay still use the metaphors of roads and rivers to mirror the alignments in the sky, and in chapter 8 we examined the concept of the World Tree at some length. Hamlet’s Mill adds another component, the recurring cosmological motif of a mysterious place where earth and sky connect and the lights of the sky, the stars, are born. In most myths, this connection is created by means of the World Tree, the unmoving axis around which creation revolves. Associated with this axis are two “gates,” or alignments, whose intersection forms the Great Cross. Most often, this mythic point of contact falls on the intersection, or crossing point, of the galactic and ecliptic plane.6

  A river or a road has almost universally been the symbol of the Milky Way, the largest and most spectacular object in the night sky. Sometimes, as at Misminay, an actual river mirrors the river in the sky. In ancient Egypt, it was the Nile that became the terrestrial counterpart of the celestial river; in India, the Ganges fulfilled the same function. As a road, it was thought to be the path of souls, entering and leaving this plane of existence through the “gates” at the galactic-ecliptic crossing points. This belief survived in Europe in the traditional association of the pilgrim route with the
Milky Way: from various places in France, the arms and edges of the galaxy, through the center of the galaxy, symbolized by the mountain passes east of Hendaye, and on to the opposite arm of the galaxy at Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.7

  The World Tree stands at the center, where the roads meet, connecting the cross in the sky, the zenith alignment of the galactic-ecliptic crossing, with the cross on the ground, in the form of a crossroads, a chapel, a temple, or a cathedral. As the self-fertilizing Atum point, it is both a womb and a phallus, and to the Greeks it was known as omphalos, literally “mother’s penis” or “navel.” The stone in the center of Cusco, another “omphalos” point, served the same function by demarcating the quarters of heaven and earth and the major alignments of celestial events. This locator stone is very similar in concept to Hewitt’s carved linga stone, the cross at Hendaye, and to the intellectual idealization of the philosopher’s stone and the Stone, the “lapsit exillis,” of the Grail. It also suggests the cubic Cybele stone, whose removal from the ancient highlands of Anatolia made Rome the center of the world.

  To the Finno-Ugaric tribes that once stretched from Finland and Lapland to western Siberia, this talismanic tree-stone-star was called the sampo, a mysterious model of the universe created by Ilmarenin, the Finnish version of Vulcan or Wayland the Smith. The root of this word, sm, is very similar to the Egyptian word sma, which denotes the concept of the two powers or forces that balance the axis pole of creation. In Sanskrit, the word for pole or pillar is skhamba. These linguistic similarities among widely differing cultures suggest that there is a connection between them, at least at the level of their symbolic function as metaphors for the unmoving axis of creation.8