The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  And this is as close as we get, from the perspective of Canseliet’s mythmaking, to the origin of the Hendaye chapter and its curious mention of a disaster and a place of refuge. But for the reality of that additional chapter, it might be possible to dismiss this story as an old man’s fabrication. Whatever really happened, the fact that the second edition of Le Mystère contained the new chapter on the Hendaye cross forces us to reexamine the whole problem of Fulcanelli’s identity.

  After that supposed encounter, however, Fulcanelli seems to have truly vanished. Canseliet never saw him again and neither has anyone else with any degree of certainty. We are left with a trail of obscure clues and semi-mythical events that echo the gender-bending “Rrose Selavy” of Duchamp, the linguistic alchemy proclaimed by Breton and Merzei, and the general “put-on” quality of a surrealist happening.

  Could the Hendaye chapter have been meant for inclusion in Dwellings, perhaps as a follow-up to the monument on the Marne? Or was it perhaps the only surviving fragment of Finis Gloria Mundi not reclaimed by an angry “Fulcanelli” in 1930? If so, why was it kept secret and leaked, as it were, to sources other than Canseliet such as Jules Boucher? Could it be, perhaps, that the Hendaye chapter was withheld because it contained clues to the identity of Fulcanelli, both as an individual and as a group? Would it have given away the whole game to publish it before the mid-1950s?

  The solution to that riddle must wait until after we have examined the growth of the Fulcanelli legend.

  THE FULCANELLI LEGEND

  However we approach the subject of alchemy, we are rewarded with a mystery, until the entire subject becomes an infinite regression of mirrored mysteries. And so, if we are not careful, we end up finding only the face of our own bias. The secret protects itself, even when it is displayed in plain sight.

  Fulcanelli serves as an example. The occult savants of Paris wanted to believe in the possibility of physical transmutation, so the suggestion that someone had actually done it grew into an obsession. Fulcanelli was a modern-day Flamel, a renegade chemist who, like the Curies, had stumbled on a way to manipulate the radioactive “light” locked within matter. No matter that not a trace of any speculation concerning atomic energy could be found in Le Mystère; all alchemists wrote in code anyway. So the mystery focused on who Fulcanelli was. If his identity could be discovered, then the transmutation could be verified. Unfortunately, no one ever claimed the title and presented his bona fides.

  But the idea persisted. There had been a “real” alchemist in the twentieth century. There is even a touch of the surreal to the image: a tall aristocratic elder guiding a group of young acolytes through the transmutational process in a municipal gasworks laboratory. Canseliet, of course, is our source for these images, leaked through the years as a way, perhaps, to carefully perpetuate the myth.31

  In the same fashion, the idea that “Fulcanelli” was simply a committee “hoax” has also handicapped our understanding of what the work itself has to say. The example of the Hendaye chapter is significant here; because it can’t be made to fit neatly into any hypothesis, it is simply ignored. Yet it is key to understanding the deepest secret of alchemy, and perhaps even the key to Fulcanelli’s identity.

  The appearance of the second edition of Dwellings of the Philosophers, in 1959, marked another watershed. The catastrophe theme was openly discussed in the final two chapters, “The Sundial of Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh” and “The Paradox of the Unlimited Progress of Science,” as well as in Canseliet’s preface to that edition.32 Within the year, the legend would gain another twist with the publication of the first New Age bestseller, Le Matin des magiciens, by Pauwels and Bergier, which would appear in English in 1963 as The Morning of the Magicians. The Fulcanelli phenomenon began to exhibit new life, growing in unexpected directions.33

  Magicians cemented the image of Fulcanelli as the archetypal twentieth-century alchemist, warning of the dangers of atomic energy like the best contemporary “space brothers” and ascended masters. In 1960, this was undoubtedly the view of the occult establishment, whose perspectives Pauwels and Bergier were exploring. Although their work is a mish-mash of ideas, Pauwels and Bergier do manage to ask some of the right questions. In the course of this investigation, we would find ourselves returning again and again to the synchronicities of Morning of the Magicians.

  The book did serve, however, to introduce the story of Fulcanelli to an English-speaking audience. A decade or so later, this interest would bear fruit in the excellent translation by Mary Sworder of Le Mystère’s second edition. Soon after the translation was published, the only full-scale work on alchemy and Fulcanelli in English appeared. The Fulcanelli Phenomenon, by Kenneth Raynor Johnson, published in England in 1980, raised more questions than it answered.

  Johnson’s discussion of the history and practice of alchemy and on Fulcanelli and Canseliet is solid and well presented. In some cases, it is our only source for large pieces of the puzzle. The careful reader, however, encounters a fair amount of special pleading, for Johnson, ultimately, is obscuring as much as he is revealing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the epilogue, an examination of the Hendaye cross written by someone named Paul Mevryl.

  In a way, we should be grateful that anyone had the courage to comment on the Hendaye cross in print. Mevryl tackles it head-on in a wild explosion of science fiction and creative cryptography. The skeptical reader may be forgiven for throwing up his hands in disgust and declaring the whole thing a hoax or a hallucination. And, perhaps, that is exactly what the article was intended to accomplish.34

  Fulcanelli, and alchemy in general, is a subject that inspires obscurantist literature. Most books on alchemy, particularly those written by adepts, are designed to confuse the unwary or naive reader. Only those readers who possess the key to the language can read their real message. But the books written about Fulcanelli, starting with Morning of the Magicians, fall into a new category of obscurantism. They seem specifically designed to obscure Fulcanelli, as if he had somehow given away too much.

  The next major work to mention Fulcanelli in any depth is also deeply obscure. Refuge of the Apocalypse, by Elizabeth Van Buren, begins with a description of the Hendaye cross and Fulcanelli’s comments on it. She quotes Fulcanelli’s warning to Canseliet, and then jumps to a statement that Fulcanelli told others that the place of refuge was Rennes-le-Château, in the Aude in southern France. From this slender reed, Van Buren builds a complex thesis that involves the bloodline of Jesus, tunnel openings, and landscape zodiacs, all pointing to Rennes-le-Château as Fulcanelli’s “single place of refuge.”35

  This digression into the world of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh, was strange enough. The next book to dwell on Fulcanelli was not as bizarre, but it raised some curious questions. Al-Kemi: A Memoir—Hermetic, Occult, Political, and Private Aspects of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, by André VandenBroeck, revealed that Schwaller, an esoteric Egyptologist and author of the monumental Temple of Man, had close connections with the Fulcanelli group. VandenBroeck strongly suggests that Schwaller de Lubicz actually was Fulcanelli, or at least the author of Le Mystère, and that Champagne stole his work.36

  At this point, all a researcher can do is to echo poor Alice: “curiouser and curiouser.” And, like Alice, somewhere along the line we stepped through the looking glass.

  THE CROSS AT HENDAYE

  From the mouth of the Nive at Bayonne to the Straits of Bidassoa, the southwest coast of France is known as the Côte d’Argent, in contrast with the Côte d’Azur of the French Riviera. While never as famous as the Riviera, the Côte d’Argent has always been something of a royal playground. The Sun King, Louis XIV, spent his honeymoon on the beach at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, while Biarritz, just a little farther up the coast, was the Victorian royal resort par excellence. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, everyone, from the empress Eugènie and Napoleon III to Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the Prince of Wales, seemed to show up for the season
.

  H. G. Wells made the small tuna-fishing town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz famous as a resort for intellectuals. It’s not hard to imagine the impeccable Wells and his walrus mustache ensconced on the long white beach, tuna nets strung from poles to dry in the sun while the boats trawl in the far distance, dictating The Outline of History to a small army of assistants. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and the smart young London set discovered Saint-Jean-de-Luz in 1920, and by 1923 or so the luxury villas had spread as far down as the new Hendaye-Plage.37 (See fig.1.6.)

  It was a few years after Louis XIV honeymooned there—around 1680, give or take a decade—that someone built an enigmatic mortuary monument in the parish cemetery of Saint Vincent’s Church at Hendaye. The date of its construction, who or what it was meant to memorialize, even its original location, have all been lost. All that is known about the Cyclic Cross, as Fulcanelli labeled it, is that it was moved from the cemetery to its present location in the southwest corner of the churchyard in 1842, when the church underwent a restoration. Patient conversation with the caretaker yields the further information that the cross was moved to honor the local d’Abbadie family, who paid for the church’s restoration.38

  Figure 1.6. Hendaye, on the Atlantic coast of southwest France and the border with Spain, lies in the heart of the Basque homeland.

  With this hard-won piece of the puzzle, we come at last to a solid historical figure with connections, in various ways, to many of the themes on the Hendaye cross. The d’Abbadie family originated in the Bearne region of the Pyrenees to the east of Hendaye and was one of the dominant families there up until the Revolution. One branch of the family settled in Dublin and became wealthy in the shipping business. The eldest son, Antoine, born in 1810, would return to Hendaye and the Basque Pyrenees after exploring Ethiopia for the French government and restore the family to its former level of prestige. In 1842, he purchased the arrow-shaped headland between Hendaye and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, paid for the restoration of Saint Vincent’s, and moved the cross or had it put together.

  In the 1860s, after several more trips to Egypt and Ethiopia, including an attempt at finding the source of the Nile, Antoine d’Abbadie returned to Hendaye and hired the finest architects of the era to build a scaled-down Gothic château. Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the architect behind the restoration of Notre-Dame-de-Paris and many other Gothic masterpieces, did most of the major design work on the Château d’Abbadie. In the 1870s and 1880s, Antoine was president of the French Academy of Sciences and was a friend and supporter of Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps in his bid to build the Suez Canal. He left the château at Hendaye to the academy and established an observatory, dedicated to cataloging stars, to carry on his work. The catalog now contains more than 500,000 stars.

  Antoine’s nephew Michel d’Abbadie and cousin Harry d’Abbadie D’Arrast carried the family tradition into new realms. Michel was a patron of the arts, and a friend of the early surrealists, including Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, as well as a close friend and contemporary of Pierre de Lesseps, son of Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, and Pierre de Lesseps has been mentioned as a friend of both Champagne and Fulcanelli. Harry’s friends were more the film star and literary types. Both Charlie Chaplin and Ernest Hemingway stayed at the Château Etzchau east of Hendaye in the Bearne. Hemingway even mentions Hendaye in The Sun Also Rises, which was published in 1926, the same year as Le Mystère.39

  In the end, it boils down to the reality of the cross itself. The family responsible for its erection has many connections, although indirect and circumstantial, with figures at the heart of the Fulcanelli mystery. Could this be the solution to the riddle of why the Hendaye chapter was kept a secret? Would its revelation in the 1920s have pointed too directly at the real “brotherhood” behind the Fulcanelli mystification? Also, the castle in Canseliet’s fanciful trip to the Pyrennes sounds like the real Château Etzchau in Saint-Etienne-de-Bagiorry, which has curious connections going back to Gaston of Foix and perhaps even Nicolas Flamel. Could all the subterfuge be hiding, and at the same revealing, for those who can see it, the true source of Hendaye’s, and by extension Fulcanelli’s, secret wisdom?

  The cross sits today in a very small courtyard just to the south of the church. There is a tiny garden with a park bench nearby. Standing about twelve feet tall, the Cyclic Cross of Hendaye looms over the courtyard, a mysterious apparition in the clear Basque sunlight. The monument is brown and discolored from its three-hundred-plus years. The stone is starting to crumble and it is obvious that air pollution—the cross sits a few yards from a busy street on the main square—is speeding its dissolution. The images and the Latin inscription on the cross have no more than a generation left before pollution wipes the images clean and the message disappears forever.

  The base of local sandstone sits on a broad but irregular three-step platform and is roughly cubic (fig. 1.7). Measurement reveals that it is a little taller than it is wide. On each face are curious symbols (see fig. 1.8): a strange shieldlike arrangement of A’s in the arms of a cross; an eight-rayed starburst; a sun face glaring like some ancient American sun god; and, most curious of all, an old-fashioned man-in-the-moon face with a prominent eye. Rising from the base is a fluted column, with a suggestion of Greek classicism, on top of which stands a very rudely done Greek cross with Latin inscriptions. Above the sun face on the western side is the figure of an X on the top portion of the cross. Below that, on the transverse arm, is the variation on the common inscription noted above, O Crux Aves / Pes Unica, “Hail, O Cross, the Only Hope.” On the reverse side of the upper cross, above the starburst, is the Christian inscription INRI.

  Figure 1.7. The base of the Hendaye cross showing the sun and the shieldlike design with its four A’s. (Photo by Darlene)

  Figure 1.8. The four sides of the base. The shieldlike design faces south, the star faces east, the sun faces west, and the moon faces north. (Photos by Darlene)

  Figure 1.9. The Hendaye cross as it is today. (Photo by Darlene)

  Fulcanelli tells us that “whatever its age, the Hendaye cross shows by the decoration of its pedestal that it is the strangest monument of primitive millenarism [sic], the rarest symbolic translation of chiliasm, which I have ever met.”40

  But what does the author mean by “primitive millenarism”? And how are the decorations on the pedestal “the rarest symbolic translation of chiliasm”? What, exactly, is chiliasm?

  Fulcanelli provides some guidance by referring to the Fathers of the Church, Origen, Saint Denis of Alexandria, and Saint Jerome, who first accepted and then refuted the chiliast doctrine. Then he tells us that chiliasm “was part of the esoteric tradition of the ancient hermetic philosophy.”

  Chiliasm was a second-century C.E. Gnostic belief in a literal renewal of the earth after its destruction on the Day of Judgment. This transformed world would be free of sin, a virtual paradise of sensual delights, feasts, and weddings, or so the Gnostic chiliasts preached. Naturally the more orthodox branches of the Church found this threatening, although, as Fulcanelli points out, it was never officially condemned. In the second century, Origen, who is now our main source of information on the chiliasts, refuted the doctrine, and chiliasm slowly faded into the heretical underground.

  “Primitive millenarism” is an even more curious phrase. The use of the word primitive in this context suggests “prime” or “primeval,” definitely pre-Christian. The monument, then, not only is an example of heretical Christian belief, but also somehow describes a primitive, or ancient, view of the end of the world. Fulcanelli underscores his point when he comments that “the unknown workman, who made these images, possessed real and profound knowledge of the universe.”

  Thus, we are presented with a strange monument that describes both a heretical Christian view of apocalypse and an ancient view of the same, apparently cosmological, event. Also of note, Fulcanelli is implying that this concept is a part of the “esoteric tradition of the ancient hermetic philosophy.” In the entire
literature of alchemy and its history, no one else has ever openly connected it with eschatology. On first glance, it seems ridiculous. How can the end of the world and the apocalypse be connected in any way with turning lead into gold?

  As we dug deeper, we discovered that Fulcanelli had left us an important clue to the big secret at the core of alchemy. We would find that alchemy had always been associated with the idea of time and timing, and that, as Fulcanelli informed us, chiliasm lay at the center of the idea of transforming time itself. We would even discover the simple and literal truth of Fulcanelli’s statement that the unknown designer of the cross had real and true knowledge of the universe. From that knowledge, displayed by the Hendaye cross, we would eventually unravel a whole new perspective on alchemy, one that touches on the deepest mysteries of magic, mysticism, and religion, and one that poses the question of extinction or enlightenment for the entire planet.

  A LODESTONE OF PURE WEIRDNESS

  Although Hendaye has grown into a good-sized resort town, the town square and Saint Vincent’s Church look much the same as they did in the 1920s and 1930s, when Fulcanelli and Lemoine the painter came to visit. Wednesday is still market day, and the vendors of fresh fish and vegetables still line the square. The people who pass by on their way to the square barely notice the nondescript cross standing against the wall of the church. Cars park a few feet away, and the everyday bustle of life in a French resort town takes place around it. Occasionally, like Monsieur Lemoine, a tourist stops to take a photograph. The ordinary tourist snaps his shot and then looks for a sign explaining what he has just taken a snap of. Finding no information except more curious images, our tourist shrugs and later labels that slide as “Cross with angry sun face, Hendaye.”