by Jay Weidner
So who was “Fulcanelli”?
In chapter 1 we looked at the Fulcanelli legend as put forth by its main proponent, Eugène Canseliet. This legend, the myth of the missing alchemist, was cultivated by Canseliet and by others in the Brotherhood of Heliopolis for reasons of their own, and was meant both to reveal a truth and to conceal an even more important one, Fulcanelli’s true identity. The truth it reveals is that the current of the underground stream actually survived into the twentieth century; what it conceals is the origin of that current’s survival.
In her book Fulcanelli dévoilé,1 Geneviève Dubois assembled all the circumstantial evidence relating to the initial group of conspirators, the Brotherhood of Heliopolis. Her conclusion, that “Fulcanelli” was the result of the combined work of Pierre Dujols, Champagne, and Canseliet, is the only plausible explanation that fits a majority of the demonstrated facts. We may suppose that Canseliet clung to the legend because it sold books; a mysterious alchemist, as immortal as Saint Germain, sounds much better as a selling point than a collective work from a group of occultists. But is that really all there is to it?
As we worked on the mystery of Le Mystère itself, we eventually re-created Pierre Dujols’s “Library of Marvels” card file. This allowed us to identify an underlying structure organizing the somewhat overwhelming profusion of images and symbols in the text. This structure, simply put, is the four projected Trees of the “Tree of Life on the celestial sphere,” the Cube of Space arrangement from the Bahir. As this structure emerged, two things became apparent: The Hendaye chapter, and its images, had in fact originally been intended for Le Mystère, and Pierre Dujols was the author of the text of Le Mystère.
In chapter 1, we speculated that the Hendaye chapter was meant for inclusion in Dwellings of the Philosophers, where the last two chapters touch on many themes, including catastrophes and Atlantis, inherent in the message of Hendaye’s cross. It could also, we felt, be a fragment of Fulcanelli’s lost last book, Finis Gloria Mundi. Intriguing as these speculations were, we couldn’t seem to make the Hendaye piece of the puzzle fit comfortably in either. And then, rather late in our investigations, it occurred to us that we had been looking at the entire problem presented by the Hendaye chapter in the wrong way.
The chapter supports the developing pattern of four projected Trees by completing the fourth and final Tree, supplying the essential top three sefirot. At the very least, this meant that whoever arranged the second edition knew the basic structure and reinforced it by adding images correctly. But it is also just as likely that Canseliet, in preparing a new edition, simply followed the original pattern, the one intended but not implemented in the 1926 edition. The question of why this was done, why the Hendaye chapter was suppressed, led us indirectly to our second conclusion, that the author of Le Mystère was in fact Pierre Dujols.
The first chapter of Le Mystère is a broad overview in nine sections that, as we saw in chapters 8 and 9, outlines the first of the four Tree of Life patterns in the work as a whole. The eighth section deals with the centrally important idea of the Black Virgins and their connection with Isis and ultimately with Cybele and the stone that fell from Heaven, the core idea of Wolfram’s Grail romance. At the beginning of this discussion, Fulcanelli quotes a passage from “the learned Pierre Dujols,” where Isis and the Virgin are identified as part of an “astronomical theogany.” In this somewhat unusual word (see chapter 9), we find a hint of divine genealogy as well as the sacred union of earth and sky.
A few pages later, after listing the ten most significant Black Virgins in France, Fulcanelli shifts back to the Dujols comment on a Cybele stone at Die in northern Provence, and does so with a first-person citation: “I have already mentioned that a stone at Die, representing Isis, referred to her as mother of the Gods.”2 Since it is Dujols himself who is quoted regarding the Die stone, we might infer that Fulcanelli is tipping his Phrygian alchemist cap to his real identity with this first-person nod. While this is not conclusive in and of itself, combined with all the other evidence presented by Dubois in Fulcanelli dévoilé, it is a very convincing, and revealing, slip of the pen.
So let us accept that the Hendaye chapter was originally part of Le Mystère, and that Pierre Dujols wrote the whole of that work. In chapter 10, we speculated that the chapter on the cross was not included because it pointed too directly to “Fulcanelli’s” true identity and that of the group around him. If Dujols is the author of Le Mystère and the Hendaye chapter, does this still hold true?
Indeed it does, but with a twist. The joker, as always in this convoluted story, is Jean-Julien Champagne, the illustrator of both Le Mystère and Dwellings. Some, such as the publisher Jean Schémit, believed that Champagne was “Fulcanelli,” while others, such as René Schwaller de Lubicz, claimed that the character he called Fulcanelli, by implication Champagne, had stolen the manuscript of Le Mystère from him.3 Only one thing seemed certain: Champagne was the focal point around which the Fulcanelli legend originally swirled. And from this seemingly solid fact would come much future mystification.
But, in fact, neither the author of the text, Dujols, nor its illustrator, Champagne, was “Fulcanelli.” In Le Mystère, the author takes the clear tone of a student elucidating the work of the master, or masters, from whom he learned his subject. In the preface to the second edition, Canseliet confirms this by including a letter whose “recipient was undoubtedly Fulcanelli’s master,” which letter was found among Fulcanelli’s papers.4 It is this individual, it seems, who has attained the great work, not his student, the author of Le Mystère. If this is not even more mystification—and that is always a possibility—then this mysterious master alchemist from the preceding generation can be thought of as the real “Fulcanelli,” the source of the current, as it were.
It was this train of thought that led us to look at the cross in a completely different light. What if the Hendaye cross and its predecessors, including perhaps Hewitt’s mysterious carved linga stone, were actually the starting point of Fulcanelli’s story? Fulcanelli suggests that the base was carved in the 1680s, a date that is supported by the degree of weathering on the images. Who, in the 1680s, knew enough to code the complex astronomical and alchemical information into a series of oddly interconnected images on the base of an obscure monument in an obscure corner of the Basque Pyrenees? And why?
Just asking these questions sheds new light on the problem of Fulcanelli’s identity. In chapter 2, we speculated that Fulcanelli’s purpose, at least in part, was to stand witness to the flowering of an esoteric tradition in the West that was as profound and transcendent as that of the East. Fulcanelli traces this lineage, as it would be termed in the East, down to the era in which the Hendaye cross was carved, the mid- to late seventeenth century. As we saw in chapter 2, this period falls in the gap between the Rosicrucian movement and the emergence of Freemasonry. Apparently, the lineage was broken at that point, or at least portions of it died out or went underground. By the mid-nineteenth century, the West was so lacking in spiritual exemplars that Theosophy found its masters and mahatmas in the East.
Yet both Fulcanelli and the Hendaye cross are evidence that the lineage did not in fact completely disappear. The late seventeenth century was the high-water mark of “scientific” alchemy and the origins of chemistry, as well as the beginning of astronomy as a science. Louis XIV built the Royal Observatory in Paris about the same time the Hendaye cross was carved, and, as Fulcanelli reminds us, placed a Black Virgin in its vaults.5 What seems to have happened is that the lineage shifted from its traditional chivalric and aristocratic base toward a community of the intellect that included scientists, artists, and writers. This shift started with the Rosicrucian movement and gained steam with the early Freemasons.
Following the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath, the lineage was again in danger of vanishing completely. A few “initiates” remained from the ancien régime, and by the 1830s the tradition had begun to revive. The publication in 1832 of He
rmes dévoilé by the mysterious Cyliani, rumored by Canseliet to be Antoine Dujols, older brother of Pierre, marks the turning point in the lineage’s revival. The same year also saw the incredible popularity of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and the beginning of an upsurge of interest in all things Gothic. Thirteen years later, a young Eugène Viollet-le-Duc would begin the restoration of Notre-Dame-de-Paris itself, his drawings and reconstructions serving eventually as a model for Champagne’s illustrations in Le Mystère.
In 1842, the d’Abbadie family in Hendaye moved the cross, with its Meso-American sun face and coded riddle about Peru, from its original location, possibly in the church’s graveyard, to its current location on the south side of the church, just a few feet from the village square. That same year, another mysterious alchemist, one Tiffereau, announced that he had discovered the secret of transmutation in Mexico. The next year, one of the initiates from the ancien régime, Louis-Paul-François Cambriel, published the results of twenty years of research. In his Cours de philosophie hermétique, Cambriel, drawing upon the seventeenth-century work of Esprit Gobineau Montluisant, points directly to the cathedrals as hermetic monuments. By 1854, when Louis Figuier published his massive Alchemy and Alchemists, the idea of a secret alchemical wisdom had been revived and the groundwork laid for Fulcanelli/Dujols’s brilliant explication in Le Mystère.6
Yet somehow, as we sorted through these connections, the Hendaye cross remained problematic. The dates that Fulcanelli/Dujols points out for us do seem to have a direct connection to the current and its survival. The mid-seventeenth century, when the base of the cross was carved, marked the shift from the chivalric to the artistic as alchemy became chemistry, as well as the first direct explanation, in Gobineau’s Explication très curieuse des enigmes et figures hiéroglyphiques, of the hermetic meaning of the images on Notre-Dame-de-Paris. The 1840s, when the cross was moved to the churchyard, saw a serious alchemical revival, including again the connection to the hermetic figures on the Gothic cathedrals. These are undoubtedly important time periods, from Fulcanelli’s perspective, but just why the Hendaye cross should be used to mark them remained unclear, particularly in light of the chapter’s suppression in the first edition.
No matter how we shifted the puzzle pieces, the Hendaye chapter remained an oddity. Was it an afterthought, a mere exclamation point to the broader pattern of Le Mystère and Dwellings? Or was it the key to the secret of alchemy, the magic thread that unravels the veil and reveals the ultimate mysteries, and therefore the most important chapter of all in understanding Fulcanelli’s message? The more convinced we were that the latter was the case, the more significant the whole issue of Hendaye became.
Working backward from Pierre Dujols brought us to a dead end. There was no evidence that he had ever visited Hendaye, or had any other connection to the region. Working forward from the nineteenth-century alchemical tradition brought us to the same impasse: no connection to Hendaye. Pierre Dujols could certainly have interpreted the cross in much the same way as we have done in chapter 11. He had connections to the esoteric currents of his era, including that of the Paris branch of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and so had the symbolism available to him. Indeed, Jules Boucher’s explanation, a decade after the first edition of Le Mystère, also shows a connection between the cross and the Tarot symbolism of groups such as the Ahathoor Temple of the Golden Dawn. And yet, the direct connection to Hendaye is missing or obscured.
If, as the Hendaye chapter suggests, the Hendaye cross in some way parallels the survival of the alchemical lineage, then its importance must have been obscured purposefully. We may never know who carved the cross, but we do know who recognized its importance and moved it to its present location. When we turn to the d’Abbadie family, and its most prominent member in the mid-nineteenth century, Antoine d’Abbadie, the puzzle starts to make more sense.
As we noted in chapter 10, in 1926 members of the d’Abbadie family were still prominent in society. A reference to Hendaye and the 1840s would have led directly to the family. Even today, that fact can be obtained with little effort, as the d’Abbadie family crest can still be seen on the church wall, just below the sundial, while standing at the cross. All of which raises the question of why it was so important to obscure this connection. Could it be hiding the source, as it were, of what later became Le Mystère and Dwellings?
Antoine d’Abbadie, although almost completely unknown outside of France, was a major figure in the nineteenth-century scientific community and the president of the French Royal Academy of Science in the 1890s. An explorer, linguist, astronomer, collector of folktales and esoteric manuscripts, and a supporter of the Gothic revival, Antoine d’Abbadie comes across as a very French predecessor of Indiana Jones. His expeditions included a search for the source of the Nile in Ethiopia, and even in the 1880s, when he was in his seventies, Antoine d’Abbadie continued to travel on a series of expeditions based on making astronomical calculations, including the 1883–84 transit of Venus across the Sun. His career parallels the emergence of the almost lost alchemical lineage, and his circle of friends and correspondents included everyone from Victor Hugo, Prosper Mérimée, and Viollet-le-Duc, who designed the Château d’Abbadie at Hendaye, to the above-mentioned Louis Figuier, Camille Flammarion, an astronomer sometimes considered to be Fulcanelli on the basis of a cipher on the name “Fulcanelli,” Ferdinand de Lesseps, and, most interesting of all, Grasset d’Orcet, the scholar of the green language, the “language of the birds,” quoted by Fulcanelli in the Hendaye chapter.7
In d’Abbadie’s notes, letters, and published work we come across odd previsions of concepts that turn up later in Le Mystère and, most of all, Dwellings. Antoine d’Abbadie’s notes from his 1835 tour of England, Ireland, and Scotland reveal a deep interest in Gothic architecture, including a look at the enigmatic icosahedron at Holyrood Castle in Scotland, discussed at length in Dwellings. His speculations on the connection between the Basques and Atlantis also find their way into Dwellings, as do his views on the age of the Sphinx and the antiquity of Egyptian civilization.8
Could Antoine d’Abbadie be the real, or original, Fulcanelli? And if so, how did this information come to be in hands of the Dujols brothers and the other members of the Brotherhood of Heliopolis? The d’Abbadies were also connected to the de Lesseps, and through them to Jean-Julien Champagne and R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, and this is a possible avenue of transmission for at least part of the information. This also explains Champagne’s attitude and position in the group. He, at the very least, considered himself the link to the “real” Fulcanelli. Could Pierre Dujols also have had a connection to the d’Abbadie family, one that was not as direct as Champagne’s?
Such a connection seems likely, but to date the solid evidence is lacking. Whether the connection came from Champagne or from Dujols, or both, the connection was obscured, covered up, and finally confused beyond any resemblance to reality by the Fulcanelli myth advanced by Canseliet and the others. Antoine d’Abbadie was a public figure, a respected scientist and member of the establishment. Even after his death in 1897, his family remained prominent, and so the need for secrecy concerning a topic as far from the orthodox mainstream of Victorian science as alchemy is plausible. It is also likely that even the main conspirators of the Brotherhood didn’t know the truth that their mythmaking was concealing.
In a way, this is very satisfying. It forces on us the most important conclusion of all.
Fulcanelli is not a person; he is a personification of the tradition, the lineage, as it emerged in the early twentieth century. Pierre Dujols wrote Le Mystère to sum up and preserve the teachings of the master, or masters, from whom he learned the tradition. He called himself Fulcanelli, which can be translated as “Vulcan’s children,” or Hephaistoi, or even Kabiroi, the divine blacksmiths who guard the secret of the stone that fell from heaven, to point to the current’s antiquity as well as, by various permutations and codes, some of the prominent members of the group arou
nd the original nineteenth-century “Fulcanelli,” Antoine d’Abbadie. Dwellings was pieced together from fragments of several works, some by Dujols based on d’Abbadie’s work and some by Canseliet and Champagne, but all written as part of that voice, that spokesman, for the tradition itself.
In the end, it is the voice of Fulcanelli’s message that proves more important than his identity. In that sense, the legend serves its purpose if, after we undertake the quest, we find the mysterious immortal adept inside ourselves.
APPENDIX A
FULCANELLI ON THE GREEN LANGUAGE
Chapter 1, section 3, of Le Mystère des cathédralesd
First of all it is necessary for me to say a word about the term gothic as applied to French art, which imposed its rules on all the productions of the Middle Ages and whose influence extends from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.
Some have claimed—wrongly—that it came from the Goths, the ancient Germanic people. Others alleged that the word, suggesting something barbarous, was bestowed in derision on a form of art, whose originality and extreme peculiarity were shocking to the people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such is the opinion of the classical school, imbued with the decadent principles of the Renaissance. But truth, preserved in the speech of the common people, has ensured the continued used of the expression gothic art, in spite of the efforts of the Academy to substitute the term ogival art. There was an obscure reason for this, which should have made our linguists ponder, since they are always on the look-out for the derivation of words. How does it come about that so few compilers of dictionaries have lighted upon the right one? The simple fact is that the explanation must be sought in the cabalistic origin of the word and not in its literal root.
