by Jay Weidner
37. For more on the region and its history, see Mark Kurlansky’s The Basque History of the World (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).
38. See also South-West France, The Lonely Planet Guide (London: Lonely Planet Press, 2000).
39. Abbadie: Une rébus géant (Cape Science, Bordeaux: Cape Science Foundation, 1998) is the only work available on the d’Abbadie family. See also the French Catholic Encyclopedia entry under Antoine d’Abbadie.
40. Le Mystère des cathédrales, pp. 165–71.
CHAPTER 2
1. James N. Powell, The Tao of Symbols (New York: Quill Books, 1982).
2. Walter Scott, ed. and trans., Hermetica, 4 vols. (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 386–91.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Le Mystère des cathédrales, p. 46.
7. Ibid., p. 158.
8. “Flying Roll VII” by S. A. [W. W. Westcott], in S. L. MacGregor Mathers, et al., Astral Projection, Ritual Magic and Alchemy, ed. Francis King (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 1987), pp. 179–91.
9. See Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (London: Neville Spearman, 1972), for more details on what the Golden Dawn hoped to accomplish.
10. See also Sapere Aude [W. W. Westcott], The Science of Alchymy (London: Theosophical Publications Society, 1983).
11. “Flying Roll VII,” pp. 179–91.
12. Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 409–13.
13. Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1979).
14. “The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of the Rosie Cross,” trans. Thomas Vaughn (1652), in Paul Allen, ed., A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology (Blauvelt, N.Y.: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981), pp. 163–90.
15. Ibid.
16. Hermetica, vol. 2, pp. 386–91.
17. R. A. Schwaller du Lubicz, Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1982), p. 214.
18. Mae-Wan Ho and Fritz-Albert Popp, “Biological Organization, Coherence and Light Emission from Living Organisms,” in W. D. Stein and F. J. Varela, eds., Thinking about Biology (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993).
19. M. Rattenmayer, “Evidence of Photon Emission from DNA in Living Systems,” Naturwissenschaften 68 (1981): 572–73; and Fritz-Albert Popp et al., eds., Recent Advances in Biophoton Research and Its Application (Singapore: World Scientific, 1992).
CHAPTER 3
1. Kurt Seligmann, The History of Magic and the Occult (New York: Harmony Books, 1975), pp. 79–83.
2. Cahiers de l’hermétisme: Sophia ou l’âme du monde (Paris: Albin Michel, 1983).
3. Le Mystère des cathédrales, p. 58. See also Jonathon Cott, Isis and Osiris (New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp. 90–91.
4. Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1998).
5. Seligmann, The History of Magic and the Occult, p. 102.
6. Ibid., p. 79.
7. Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 191–96; also, Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), chapter 8, pp. 141–62.
8. Karen Armstrong, A History of God (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), pp. 55–61.
9. Jeremiah 31:31–39.
10. While fundamentalists, who believe the Bible is the direct and whole inspiration of God, hold that all of the book of Isaiah was written by the same person, modern biblical scholarship suggests that the great part of chapters 40–55 was written later, after the exile in Babylon. See Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, pp. 151–57.
11. Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).
12. Matthew 24:29–35.
13. Ibid.
14. “The Greek Alchemical Papyri,” Ciba Symposia 3, no. 5 (1941).
15. Brackets indicate additions in the text.
16. Matthew 28.
17. Ibid., verse 20.
18. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).
19. Ibid.
20. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1986).
21. Ibid.
22. Revelation 4:1.
23. Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, p. 212.
24. Y. Rubinsky and I. Wiseman, A History of the End of the World (New York: Quill Books, 1982), p. 57.
25. Seligmann, The History of Magic and the Occult, p. 88.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Fox, Pagans and Christians.
29. The Middle Ages: A Concise Encyclopaedia (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), s.v. “Francis I.”
30. Rubinsky and Wiseman, A History of the End of the World, p. 56.
31. Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983).
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Robert Payne, The Making of the Christian World (New York: Dorset Press, 1990).
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great.
CHAPTER 4
1. Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers, trans. Mary P. Ryan (Minneapolis, Minn.: Winston Press, 1963).
2. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels.
3. Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (New York: New American Library, 1979).
4. Nehunya Ben ha-Kanah, The Bahir, translation, introduction, and commentary by Aryeh Kaplan (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1979).
5. Ibid., p. xix.
6. Ibid., verse 179, p. 69.
7. Ibid.
8. Psalm 78:2.
9. Neil Asher Silberman, Heavenly Powers: Unraveling the Secret History of the Kabbalah (Edison, N.J.: Castle Books, 2000).
10. Bahir, pp. 34, 40.
11. Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, 6:1, trans., Aryeh Kaplan (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1990), pp. 231–56.
12. Ibid., p. 232.
13. Ibid., p. 244.
14. John Major Jenkins, Galactic Alignment (Rochester, Vt.: Bear and Co., 2002).
15. Sefer Yetzirah, p. 238.
16. Bahir, p. 40.
17. Ibid., p. 35.
18. Sefer Yetzirah, p. 240.
19. Ibid., p. 242.
20. Max I. Dimont, Jews, God and History (New York: New American Library, 1962).
21. Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosis, Merkabah Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1965), quoting the Talmud on Genesis 15:5.
22. Caesar E. Farah, Islam (New York: Barron’s, 1987).
23. Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p. 249.
24. Farah, Islam.
25. A. J. Arberry, Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
26. Personal communication from the Sheik of the Al Haggagi Sufis of Luxor, Egypt.
27. Arberry, Sufism.
28. Ibid.
29. Idries Shah, The Sufis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964).
30. Peter Partner, The Knights Templar and Their Myth (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 1990).
CHAPTER 5
1. Raphael Patai, The Jewish Alchemists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 51–56.
2. For a good overview of the mystical developments, see Armstrong, A History of God, chapter 7, “The God of the Mystics.” For a look at the decline of the West, see J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West (New York: Barnes & Nobles Books, 1998), and Michael Wood, In Search of the Dark Ages (London: Facts on File, 1987). For the relationship between Europe’s Dark Ages and the Islamic world, see R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne & the Origins of Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983).
3. W.
P. Ker, The Dark Ages (New York: New American Library, 1958), p. 25.
4. Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds, eds., Convivencia: Jews, Muslims and Christians in Medieval Spain (New York: George Braziller, 1992).
5. Robert Payne, The Dream and the Tomb (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Scarborough House, 1984).
6. Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1992).
7. James Reston Jr., The Last Apocalypse (New York: Doubleday, 1998), chapter 12, “Otto the Dreamer.”
8. Taqi ad-Din al-Maqrizi, The Book of the History of the Kings, M. Ziyade’s English/Arabic edition (Cairo, 1934).
9. Ker, The Dark Ages, p. 128.
10. See Saint Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. and intro. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin Books, 1974).
11. Stanislas Guyard, “Un grand Maître des assassins au temps de Saladin,” in Journal Asiatique, 7th series, 9 (1877): 324–489.
12. Taqi ad-Din al-Maqrizi, The Book of the History of the Kings.
13. Malcolm Billings, The Cross & the Crescent: A History of the Crusades (New York: Sterling Publishing, 1990).
14. Sir Stephen Runciman, The First Crusade (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 42–43.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., p. 48.
17. Sir Stephen Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952).
18. René Grousset, Historie des croisades et du royaume franc de Jerusalem (Paris: Perrin, 1935).
19. Reston, The Last Apocalypse.
20. Peter Partner, The Knights Templar and Their Myth.
21. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950), p. 788.
22. The idea of the prima materia is a central one in alchemy. Later authors speculate that it is everywhere and in everything, as common as dirt, in one sense. But this was not the understanding current in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The eleventh-century manuscript of the pseudo-Khalid ibn Yazid, the major work of Hebrew and Arabic alchemy between Zosimos and the provençal kabbalists, comments that alchemy, “this magisterium of ours about the secret stone,” was kept hidden among the descendants of Abraham, “His people.” Khalid also comments that the stone “is not a stone, that is, neither a stone nor of the nature of a stone,” implying that it is a “stone” not from this earth. (See Patai, The Jewish Alchemists, chapter 9.) As we shall see in later chapters, this idea of a “stone” not of this earth recurs in the Grail legends, and even has some scientific foundation as a prima materia according to the research of Dr. Paul LaViolette and modern pseudo-alchemists such as David Hudson.
23. Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
24. Ibid., pp. 409–24.
25. W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad’s Mecca: History and the Qur’an (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988).
26. Taqi ad-Din al-Maqrizi, The Book of the History of the Kings.
27. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982).
28. Seligmann, The History of Magic and the Occult.
29. Ibid.
30. Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy (London: Penguin Books, 1967).
31. Seligmann, The History of Magic and the Occult.
32. Partner, The Knights Templar and Their Myth.
CHAPTER 6
1. R. S. Loomis and L. A. Loomis, eds., Medieval Romances (New York: Random House, 1957), foreword to Chrétien’s Perceval pp. 5–7. Also D. D. R. Owen, trans. Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes (London, Everyman, 1993), pp. xi–xxii.
2. Julius Evola, The Mystery of the Grail, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1997), argues that Robert de Boron’s work represents an earlier and parallel tradition not directly derived from Chrétien’s sources.
3. Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
4. Nigel Bryant, trans., The High Book of the Grail (Perlesvaus) (Ipswich, England: D. S. Brewer, 1978).
5. P. M. Matarasso, trans., The Quest of the Holy Grail (London: Penguin Classics, 1969).
6. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. A. T. Hatto (London: Penguin Books, 1980).
7. See Evola, The Mystery of the Grail, pp. 70–71, for a discussion of the “stone” and its connection to both the Black Stone of Mecca and the “stone” of exile of the Hebrew alchemical tradition.
8. See Malcolm Godwin, The Holy Grail (New York: Viking Books, 1994), for a discussion of the importance to the alchemical tradition of Wolfram’s Parzival.
9. Lord Byron, “The Prisoner of Chillon,” from Lord Byron: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford Press, 2000).
10. David Ovason [Fred Gettings], The Nostradamus Code (London: Arrow Books Limited, 1998).
11. Archibald Lyall, The South of France (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983).
12. Ibid.
13. Michael Grant, The Jews in the Roman World (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1995).
14. Ibid.
15. Roselyne Moreaux, Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (Marseilles: Éditions PEC, 2000).
16. Ibid.
17. Pindar, Fourth Pythian Ode, mentioned in Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (London: Penguin Books, 1960), p. 219.
18. Lyall, The South of France, pp. 141–42.
19. Catholic Encyclopaedia, Internet edition (2002), s.v. “St. Trophime” and “Alyschamps.”
20. The Anglo-Norman Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle of William de Briane (London: Blackwell and Sons for Anglo-Norman Text Society, undated copy).
21. Le Mystère des cathédrales, pp. 46, 170.
22. Lyall, The South of France.
23. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Caxton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1914).
24. Owen, Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes.
25. Adolf Kroeger, The Minnesinger of Germany (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1873), and J. Rowbotham, The Troubadours and the Court of Love (London, 1895).
26. Ernst Richard, History of Germany Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1991), p. 186.
27. Ibid.; see also Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2.
28. Stephen Howarth, The Knights Templar (New York: Atheneum, 1982).
29. Ibid.
30. Zoe Oldenborg, Massacre at Montségur, trans. Peter Green (New York: Random House, 1961).
31. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2.
32. Ibid.
33. E. Vacandard, The Inquisition, trans. Bertrand Conway (New York: Longmans, Green, 1908).
34. Oldenborg, Massacre at Montségur.
35. Ibid.
36. E. Vacandard, The Inquisition.
37. Quoted in Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Atheneum, 1979), p. 117.
38. Oldenborg, Massacre at Montségur.
39. Ibid., p. 376.
40. Ibid., p. 378.
41. Jean Guiraud, “Le Consolamentum ou l’initiation cathare; le repression de l’heresie au moyen age,” in Questions d’historie et d’archeologie chrétiennes (Paris: V. Lecoffre, 1906). Also discussed in Oldenborg, Massacre at Montségur.
42. Quoted in Roger J. Woolger, “The Holy Grail: Healing the Sexual Wound in the Western Psyche,” privately printed pamphlet article in Pilgrimage 2, no. 2 (Summer 1983).
43. Ibid.
44. Durant, The Age of Faith, p. 1037.
45. Ibid., p. 1038.
46. Le Mystère des cathédrales, pp. 42, 44.
47. Quercob Historical Society, pamphlet about Château Puivert, n.d.
48. Durant, The Age of Faith, p. 1036.
49. Ibid.
50. Owen, Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, pp. xi–xxii.
51. Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World (London: Wiedenfield, 1993), p. 181.
52. Kaplan, The Bahir.
53. Ibid., p. xiii.
54. Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosis, Merkabah Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition.
55. Silberman, Heavenly Powers: Unraveling the Secret History of the Kabbalah.
56. Pierre Dujols, “An Explicative Hypotose of Magaphon on the Mutus Liber,” in Les nobles écrits de Pierre Dujols (1914; reprint, Grenoble: Mercure Dauphinois, 2000).
57. Kaplan, The Bahir.
58. Silberman, Heavenly Powers.
59. Patai, The Jewish Alchemists.
60. Ibid.
61. Silberman, Heavenly Powers.
62. Oldenborg, Massacre at Montségur.
63. Shulamit Shachar, “Catharism and the Origins of the Kabbalah in Languedoc,” in Tabriz 40 (1970–71), 483–507.
64. Kaplan, The Bahir.
65. Ibid.
66. Silberman, Heavenly Powers.
67. Kaplan, The Bahir.
68. Rubinsky and Wiseman, A History of the End of the World.
69. John Hogue, The Last Pope (London: Element Books, 1998).
70. James Trager, People’s Chronology (New York: Henry Holt, 1992).
71. Arthur Upham Pope, “Persia and the Holy Grail,” in John Matthews, ed., Sources of the Grail (New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1997), pp. 332–46.
72. Oldenborg, Massacre at Montségur.
CHAPTER 7
1. Durant, The Age of Faith, p. 863.
2. Robert Cole, A Traveller’s History of Paris (New York: Interlink Books, 1994).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Allen Temko, Notre-Dame of Paris (New York: Viking Press, 1955), p. 22.
6. Erwin Panofsky, trans., Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946).
7. Ibid.
8. Peg Streep, Mary, Queen of Heaven (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1997).
9. M. R. James, Excluded Books of the New Testament (London: Nash & Grayson, 1927), translations in text from Peg Streep, Mary, Queen of Heaven.
10. Le Mystère des cathédrales, p. 57.
11. Ibid., p. 61.
12. Malcolm Billings, The Cross & the Crescent.
13. Ian Robertson, Blue Guide: France (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 713.
14. Graves, The Greek Myths.
15. O. R. Gurney, “The Hittites,” in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 115.
16. Sir James Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris (London: Macmillan, 1907).
17. Arthur Weigall, The Paganism in Our Christianity (New York, London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928).
