They were watching me as I stood waiting for the bus near the church. Mothers with children, elderly folk, people going about their business at the tail end of the sweltering day. Of course, news would have got around about me asking questions in the village the day before, but I knew it was more than simple resentment of my investigation that burned behind their eyes. I could feel it, as if the vast sentience of the hillside had followed me down the path and settled over the village and its inhabitants in a caul of ringing heat, looking out through every pair of eyes. Father Brynn was by the church door, but he did not come to me. He simply watched, as the others did. I knew they were all waiting for me to leave, urging it. And I was eager to do so. I did not want to make them feel threatened by my presence. Who knows how far they’d go? I would report what I’d seen and witnessed, what Father Brynn wanted me to believe. An imaginative young girl at the brink of womanhood. Credulous people who believed they’d been healed. Superstitions that still live in the heart of the countryside, perhaps made real in mind by an older faith.
*
Ill health prevents me from further investigation at present. What I experienced and saw – and suspected – is certainly at odds with Christian teaching, of course, but to me the book is closed on this case, even if I suspect I read only half of it. The old ways have not died out completely, but it is my belief that when a community respects God and the Church, whatever else they might believe, they should be left to their own devices. Delusion it may be, but harmless, if we let them alone. This is what I experienced in the village of Llanelyn in the summer of 1959.
Ω
Sometimes in history the Church has taken up arms against heresy and ‘false beliefs’, through the Inquisition, through Crusades, through other means that have caused pain and taken lives. And sometimes it has quietly made accommodation with other beliefs, building a chapel at an ancient holy site, or adapting a local goddess into a Christian saint, and no one has been harmed by it.
It has been said that the difference between a miracle and magic is that one is done in the name of God and the other in the name of the gods.
This investigation was clearly troubling to Bartholomew Coombe. To do his job he should have continued his enquiry, but instead he closed the case. In doing so was he shirking his responsibility to the Church? Or was he perhaps showing wisdom in not probing further, in leaving well, so to speak, alone?
If so, in such a case his report would soundlessly vanish into the Vatican Vaults.
1965
In 1965 the Catalan surrealist artist Salvador Dalí produced an unusual painting entitled La Gare de Perpignan – Perpignan Station. Dalí claimed that this railway station in the Languedoc, southern France, was ‘the centre of the universe’, and that he had experienced a vision of ‘cosmogenic ecstasy’ there in 1963.
The painting is on open display in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne; we would not have expected to find references to it hidden away in the Vatican Vaults. Yet a file enigmatically labelled ‘unresolved’ held a number of documents relating not only to Dalí’s experience, which led to his painting, but to previous unusual experiences going back centuries. The documents are fragmentary, and from the marginal notes in different hands appear to have been drawn together, edited, summarised and commented on by more than one archivist over the years, the final compilation being shortly after Dalí painted Perpignan Station.
The Mountain Wind
Patrice Chaplin
The file labelled ‘unresolved’ began with several disparate references on separate sheets, with comments linking them.
A page dated 1750 described Hungarians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries visiting a site, known as a portal, in order to restore themselves.
When questioned by Vatican agents sent to investigate this strange practice they claimed this was a precise point of intense energy which promoted well-being. A scrawled marginal note read: ‘That was the excuse they gave.’
It was understood that these practices had originated in medieval times and that there were several sites, not just one as the Hungarians claimed. The thinking of the Church at that time was not concerned with portals and this activity was finally deemed harmless as no rituals or black magic had been observed as had originally been expected.
Further notes at the end of the eighteenth century mentioned a member of the powerful Habsburg dynasty seeking a portal on the peak of Mount Canigou in the Pyrenees mountain range between France and Spain.
An earlier account discovered in the vaults, and added to this file, related to ecclesiastical involvement in the thirteenth century. It told of when ‘a being of light came through this portal aperture’ and said it had been ‘walking the earth since before the construction of the first pyramid’.
It said its purpose was to heal and help man to become spiritually evolved and to raise awareness of other previous divinities.
‘This being seemed to be made of shards of light,’ one observer said. Too many witnessed its appearance for the Church to act without due consideration.
King Jaime I of Aragon heard of this apparition, and that many had been healed of suffering by its laying on of hands.
The being of light had made a prophecy that a painting featuring a bright cross would come into existence and show something termed ‘a station’ swept by a mountain wind, and it would reveal the veracity of the portal.
The Vatican decided this ‘stranger’ could not be claimed by the Church as a miracle or a saint and must be condemned as a heretic for the reference to other gods. Knowledge of its existence must be suppressed.
But legends in the region surrounding the portal supported the stranger’s testimony. It was said that during an almighty storm, when it was believed the sun would collide with the earth, a being of light had crashed to the valley between the mountains near Canigou 3,000 years before Christ and had been laid on a stone cradle, a dark blue, smooth meteorite, said still to be in existence. The cradle was reported to have emerged from the portal and had nurtured this being of light; knowledge of the portal’s healing tradition was handed down orally through the ages. It was further claimed that visitors to this place had inadvertently stepped into another reality, another time, and in fear had recounted their experience to the nearest priest. However, it was concluded that these unfortunate travellers were merely drunk.
The discovery of this document and the sudden interest of the Habsburgs in the late eighteenth century prompted the Vatican to send its agents to look into the portal affair. A draft report, supported by accounts from witnesses, confirmed that a portal was said to exist; it was described as a gap in the atmosphere just above the earth from which men could leave the planet and material from space could enter.
There were earlier descriptions of this phenomenon, as far back as ancient Egypt. The seventeenth-century artist Poussin was said to be a seeker of these other existences and the portal secret was thought to be coded into some of his works.
*
An early nineteenth-century archivist decided the matter had been of interest only to the Jews of Spain. Medieval rabbinic scholars and Cabbalists of Girona were thought to have used secret practices to journey to and from what appeared to be a portal in Catalonia, and to leave the dimensions that make up the Universe ‘as we know it’. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 there were no further accounts of Cabbalistic practices relating to a portal.
The Vatican for some time checked for hearsay in other European mountainous areas, without result. Did this portal possibility occur only in Hungary and north-eastern Spain? For the Spanish, survival was now paramount; the people, ravaged by plague and wars with France, were more concerned with working the land, baking bread and trading in minerals.
The directive from the Vatican was to keep the matter from spreading, and to refute any further portal claims. No more was heard on the subject for a few decades.
*
The files were brought out from the Vaults again because of
a document found in the possession of an Englishman, George Borrow, who worked for the British and Foreign Bible Society in London.
In the late 1830s he travelled across Spain on horseback, bringing the New Testament to the Spanish. A convivial man, he met many travellers with stories to share over a tavern dinner at night, and later wrote of his journeys.
News reached the Vatican that the Bible-seller’s document contained evidence of a group of men with scientific leanings investigating a portal in the Pyrenees.
They had determined the precise location of the aperture and measured its velocity, the power of its magnetic field and its structure using a handmade purpose-built device.
The energy of the portal was strong enough to harm the average person, yet a small distance away, beyond the activity of the portal, the energy charge dropped substantially and could be tolerated by most people.
The Vatican gave instructions for George Borrow to be held in prison in Madrid on an unrelated charge and share his confinement with spies who would encourage him to talk of his findings.
Officially questioned later, he truthfully answered that a man he met on his many travels gave him the document for safe-keeping. The man had witnessed extraordinary happenings at the portal site and the energy from the ground had made his legs and feet vibrate until the pain was unbearable.
This document was added to the Vatican file. It included a paragraph explaining that the human body did not enter the portal, only the conscious thinking process held by the ‘etheric body’, a term George Borrow believed to mean the sheath that after death held the subtle body on its return to God.
He himself had not been present as the notorious mountain wind had reached over 160 kilometres an hour, making it impossible to climb.
George Borrow, because he was English and had many supporters in Spain, had to be freed. The scientific group was never found, and eventually the file was closed and placed back in the Vaults.
After the Borrow incident the Vatican sent their own investigator to the portal site. He searched for changes in atmosphere among the stones and rubble at the peak. He looked for signs of instability above the tree line. But he found nothing. The portal was dismissed as hearsay.
The only other unusual occurrence was that a part of the text in the files relating to the being of light and his destruction had been erased; it was unclear who had given the order.
*
In the 1930s a new file was started relating to Hitler’s interest in the mystery of Mount Canigou, and a visit made by Himmler to try to locate a passage through space called a gateway. Otto Rahn, the German Grail writer, was also mentioned.
Before Christ the Phoenicians had landed on the Spanish coast and crossed to Mount Canigou. Were they seeking the portal, or minerals?
*
The final and by far the largest file concerned Salvador Dalí, the controversial artist. He was born near Figueras in north-east Spain in the path of the mountain wind from Canigou; it was in his blood.
Word had reached the Vatican that in 1963 this master of the surreal, while sending off his paintings from Perpignan Station on the French border, had by chance literally fallen into a secret that the Vatican had held for centuries – a secret which they now feared could change reality, destroy belief and with it, to some degree, the power of the Church.
An outpouring of metaphysical arguments against organised religion, pernicious rumours of a sacred bloodline, the advance of the female into a male-dominated belief system and the uncovering of papal conspiracies hounded the Vatican daily, and portals were now very much present in the Church’s thinking.
Perpignan Station, in the shadow of Mount Canigou, was where Dalí personally sent off his paintings to America as he did not trust the Spanish postal system.
That this flamboyant iconic mystic should, on one of these excursions, be drawn into a rare energy, supposedly from the mountain, and fall through a portal into another reality altogether – well, this would have to happen to him. That he would then, without a second thought, tell the world – of this, the Vatican had no doubt.
The meeting in Rome to decide how the matter should be suppressed was unusually divided. Many present did not believe in the portal, even when it was vaguely remembered that a being of light had appeared through such a gap in contradiction to the Church’s doctrines.
It was agreed that Dalí had experienced some sort of mystical awakening, and that there was a challenge to Church teaching.
The Vatican instructed agents to suppress Dalí’s accounts, whether of the spoken word, the written word or testimony in medical documents (it was stated he was now in shock).
But it wasn’t the word the Vatican had to fear: it was a painting. Dalí would recount the unrecountable in the manner he knew best – and the information was there for the world to see in his new work Perpignan Station.
Unlike the well-being-seeking Hungarians, the wraith from the portal, Dalí was too celebrated to suppress. He had no need of bribes, he seemed beyond threats, and he had an instinctive distrust of Jesuits.
Dalí had returned from the experience in an unusual state, even for him. The Universe had opened up and he was flying back in time. There was only one solution: paint it. His announcement speech – ‘Perpignan Station is the centre of the Universe and no one knows it’ – mystified many people, though not the Vatican.
The esteemed Dr Vila Carerras, a senior security officer at the Vatican, called a crisis meeting to consider how much influence Dalí had. He announced his belief that people would assume Dalí was just extending his flaunting of the bizarre through storytelling because his paintings were not doing it for him any more. But then Dr Carerras began to show his irritation.
‘Who cares what he thinks and does? It is others we have to watch – remember the one or two who have always been against us?
‘Dalí’s scratchings are going to make those people remember what they once heard, about a figure issuing from an invisible passage, who had a story to tell, and the unfortunate cover-up that followed,’ he said.
‘What price to cover this up?’ he demanded. ‘We must put out the story that Dalí is depressed, hallucinating. I don’t have any time for this show-off. He can’t even paint clocks properly. His watches are misshapen. Time? You won’t find it in these crazy pictures! Only Dalí could fall into what has been hidden for all these years. Get someone to deal with this . . . Warn the painter his work is sacrilege and frighten him. And find the file of the English Bible-seller in case there is more we need to know. All this was safe here for centuries – it takes this dislikeable show-off to shake off the dust.’
Dr Carerras realised as he spoke that he was staring at a reproduction of the railway station painting. A man was sliding in a fall along the track and the train behind him was catching up; on either side were platforms with figures, unaware, coming forward but at the same time going back in history . . .
He saw the yellow Maltese Cross emanating from behind the falling man, its rays brightening up the foreground.
Then he remembered the prediction of the portal wraith, from that earlier unhappy time.
Those present would later claim that it was while looking at the reproduction of Dalí’s painting, Perpignan Station, that Dr Carerras appeared to pass through some physical change. One commented that this stern man seemed to soften and even become compassionate.
The security chief explained his revelation to the group, and why it now caused him to reverse his decision to silence the artist. Maybe Dalí had had a revolutionary experience on that platform and been sucked into the illusive gap of a portal structure, which should not exist, and for ever afterwards it would change his inner existence.
Not without pity he concluded, ‘Let’s just say he fell forward on the station, blown by the mountain wind.’
Ω
The inclusion in the files of what is clearly part of a verbatim transcript from a Vatican security meeting (the officer’s name has been changed for
anonymity) adds credence to the Vatican’s concern not just about Dalí’s painting Perpignan Station, but the whole issue of portals.
The evidence, such as it is, is scattered over several centuries: fragmentary accounts, anecdotes, reports of folk beliefs. Whether such portals might actually exist is beyond the remit of this committee, but the Vatican appears to have given them serious attention for some centuries.
1970 (1770)
There have long been stories about Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere, a setting of Psalm 51 composed in the 1630s. It must only be performed in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican; Pope Urban VIII decreed that it was forbidden to remove it from the Vatican or to transcribe it on pain of excommunication; the young Mozart heard it once and wrote a perfect transcription from memory.
The following documents found in a file marked Allegri’s Miserere can only add further to the mythology of this famous piece of music. We begin with the eighteenth-century records.
Miserere
Sarah Ash
Rome, April 1770
One by one the candle flames were extinguished in the Sistine Chapel as the last sombre cadences of the Tenebrae responses echoed around the shadowed vault. The darkening air was filled with the bitter, burning smoke of snuffed wicks. And then, out of the shadows, came the first chanted notes of Allegri’s famed Miserere:
‘Miserere mei, Deus. Have mercy upon me, O God . . .’
Tales from the Vatican Vaults Page 49