The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  Standing before the cross, however, in the bright Basque sunlight on a busy Wednesday market morning, we came face-to-face with the great mystery. Fulcanelli’s new chapter in Le Mystère was designed to link, uniquely in alchemical literature, chiliasm to the secret of practical alchemy and thereby point directly to the real secret, the nature of time itself.

  Like a lodestone of pure weirdness, this juxtaposition of the end of the world with the transmutational process of alchemy attracted us to its mystery. Our involvement began accidentally when one of us picked up a copy of Le Mystère at a yard sale. Over a decade later, the code was cracked, and, as the implications emerged, the mystery began to consume our lives. Other than validating the existence of the cross, however, going to Hendaye and researching its history left us with few clues. The cross itself seemed to have almost no history, and other than Fulcanelli and Boucher, it is unremarked upon.

  But it does exist. And the symbols on it are just as Fulcanelli described. Could the cross at Hendaye really be a monument to the double catastrophe that will “try the northern hemisphere with fire,” as Fulcanelli insists?

  That blustery spring morning standing in front of the cross, we decided that it brought into focus five categories of questions that must be answered in order to evaluate its message. These are:

  Is Fulcanelli telling the truth? Is there any connection, in history or tradition, between alchemy and such Gnostic eschatologies as chiliasm? And if there is a connection, how has it been maintained through the centuries? Is the secret really displayed on the walls of certain Gothic cathedrals?

  What does Fulcanelli have to say about alchemy and the cross at Hendaye? Does that information shed any light on the connection between alchemy and eschatology?

  What do the symbolic images and ciphers on the cross mean? How are they “the rarest symbolic translation” of an apocalyptic philosophy? And, most important of all, do they suggest a date?

  Is there any scientific evidence to support the idea of what Fulcanelli called the “double catastrophe”? And does that evidence also suggest any insight into alchemy?

  If this catastrophe is cyclical, what happened the last time? Can we find any proof?

  Standing in front of the cross at Hendaye that day, we realized the importance of having answers to these questions. We needed information, solid facts, to resolve the mystery. We never suspected that once we had laid bare the meaning of Fulcanelli and the cross, the real work would begin.

  As we found answers, both expected and unexpected, to our list of questions, we found that our subject was expanding, also in ways both expected and unexpected. We agreed that we would focus first on the meaning of the Hendaye chapter and of the monument itself. The history of alchemy would have to be included, we thought, but only to support Hendaye’s message. We had no intention of attempting to unravel the ultimate mystery of alchemy itself, much less carry out an exhaustive examination of the contents of Le Mystère des cathédrales and Dwellings of the Philosophers. We simply wanted to know if the things Fulcanelli reported in the Hendaye chapter were true.

  Now, after years of intensive research, we can definitively state that not only is the information in “The Cyclic Cross of Hendaye” true but that it also demonstrates a sophisticated knowledge of galactic mechanics, something that Fulcanelli would have been hard-pressed to come by in the 1920s, but even more so the designer of the cross itself, working back in 1680. The implications of this are staggering.

  TWO

  THE SECRET OF ALCHEMY

  THE ALCHEMICAL MEME AND SECRET SOCIETIES

  At the heart of the alchemical mystery lies a secret. This is no ordinary secret, however, for it is that which cannot be told, the experience of gnosis. Ultimately, this inexplicable knowing cannot be conferred or taught in any ordinary manner, only incubated and gestated through a mysterious process known as initiation. This initiation can come in a number of ways, usually through someone who already knows, but occasionally it occurs by means of sacred texts and direct insight.

  The alchemical gnosis has been transmitted from generation to generation, through thousands of years. We find the same content in experiences of gnosis from the modern samyama experiments at Maharishi University to the ancient Egyptians.1 We find the same content in spontaneous experiences from mystics of all eras. The secret at the core of alchemy is an ineffable experience of the real workings of our local cosmological neighborhood.

  So how can one incubate and gestate such an experience? The answer may lie in the word transmitted. Modern sociologists have begun to discuss the concept of memes, or complex idea groups—such as monotheism and democracy—that appear to have the ability to replicate themselves. Memes seem to have other properties as well, such as an unusual psychic component. The spread of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century is a superb example of a viral-like meme outbreak, and traces of Spiritualism’s meme can be found surviving into the New Age nineties, with its dolphin channeling and near-death experiences. Hollywood films such as The Sixth Sense are deeply influenced by Spiritualism’s perspective on the afterlife, conveying the meme directly and powerfully to millions of moviegoers.

  It helps to think of the secret at the core of alchemy as a very special and sophisticated variety of meme. Like a spore or a seed, the meme has a protective shell that is also attractive to appropriate hosts. In the case of the alchemy meme, that shell is the seductive allure of the transmutation of base metal into gold. Even if one absorbs the outer shell of the alchemy meme, however, there is no guarantee that the inner core will blossom and the meme become active. For that to happen, a series of shocks or initiations is required.

  The sophistication of the alchemy meme is such that the experience of gnosis at its core can be stimulated only by these shocks. Therefore, to transmit the idea complex of the gnosis meme through time requires a series of encounters between those in whom the meme is active and those who have merely been exposed to it. From this need evolved the idea of priesthoods and then, as religious structures degenerated, mystery schools and secret societies. We can think of these as incubation devices for spiritual memes.

  Through the millennia, the undigested seed of the alchemy meme was jumbled together with other spiritual memes, creating a seemingly endless series of hybrid spiritual expressions masquerading as alchemy. From its appearance in first-century Alexandria to its modern expressions, however, the secret at the core of the alchemy meme can be traced by its gnostic ineffableness. The secret protects itself, but in doing so leaves an unmistakable fingerprint. By following these gnostic fingerprints, we can track the progress of the alchemy meme through history.

  EGYPT: ISIS AND HORUS

  The word alchemy, as a name for the substance of the mystery, is both revealing and concealing of the true, initiatory nature of the work. Al-khem, Arabic for “the black,” refers to the darkness of the unconscious, the most prima of all materia, and to the “Black Land” of Egypt. Thus, the name reveals the starting point of the process and the place where this science attained its fullest expression. This revelation, however, important as it is, effectively conceals the nature of the transmutation at the heart of the great work.

  For three thousand years or more Egypt was the heart of the world. Much of the knowledge that is the underpinning of Western civilization had its origins in Egypt. The lenses of Greek and Judeo-Christian “history” distort our modern, essentially European, view of the ancient world. The Bible gives us an Egypt of powerful pharaohs and pagan magicians, mighty armies, slaves, and invasions of chariots out of the south. Herodotus gives us a travelogue, complete with inventive stories from his guides. To the Hebrews of the Old Testament, Egypt was the evil of the world from which God had saved them. To the Greeks, it was an ancient culture to be pillaged for ideas and information. To understand the origin of alchemy, we must let go of the Hebraic and Greek bias and look clearly at what the remains of the ancient Egyptian culture can tell us.

  When we do this, two things i
mmediately jump out at us. First, the ancient Egyptians were the most scientifically advanced culture on the planet until the present day, if we have indeed caught up with them; and second, their science—in fact, their entire culture—seems to be have been revealed rather than developed. The Egyptians claimed that their knowledge was derived from the actions of divine forces in what they called the First Time, or Zep Tepi. A group known as the Heru Shemsu, or the Company of Horus—also called the Company of the Wise, the Companions of Horus, and the Followers of the Widow’s Son (fig. 2.1)—passed down a body of knowledge through the ages. Each pharaoh, down to Roman times, was an initiate of the Company of Horus and thus privy to this secret knowledge.

  We can think of this secret knowledge as the core of “alchemy” in its broadest sense. But as we look closer at what the Egyptians tell us about their science, we find that it is based on an intimate understanding of astronomy. We also find that it is coded into many of Egypt’s ancient monuments. These monuments, such as the Sphinx and its temple, point to an even more ancient civilization from which the Egyptians recovered their knowledge. In that sense, the knowledge of the Egyptians, of which alchemy is a half-remembered fragment, is the lost science of the last evolutionary epoch. But if this is true, what happened to end this epoch?

  Figure 2.1. The Heru Shemsu, or Company of Horus.

  In legends and in Plato’s dialogues we find a name for this advanced civilization that was destroyed in a great disaster more than 12,000 years ago. The Egyptians told Solon of Athens that the ancient culture was named Atlantis. Little did we know, as we embarked on the search for Fulcanelli and the secret of the Hendaye cross, that the trail would eventually lead us to a place high in the Andes that just might be Plato’s Atlantis.

  One of the earliest of all alchemical manuscripts is the fragmentary “Isis the Prophetess to Her Son Horus,” found in the Codex Marcianus, a medieval collection of Greek texts. This work seems to be a unique blend of Hebrew mysticism and Egyptian mythology that could only have come from Alexandria early in the first century C.E. In this seminal text, the Egyptian goddess Isis tells her son, Horus, that while he was away fighting and defeating the evil one, Seth, she was in Hermopolis studying angelic magic and alchemy. She relates that “after a certain passing of the kairoi and the necessary movement of the heavenly sphere, it happened that one of the angels who dwelt in the first firmament saw me from above.”2 The angel is enflamed by sexual passion for Isis, but he can’t answer her questions about alchemy. He bargains on another encounter by offering to bring a higher angel who will tell her everything she wants to know. The first angel shows Isis the magical sign of the higher angel. This sign consists of a bowl of shining water and a moon symbol that resembles the emblem of the moon god Khonsu of Thebes.

  At noon the next day, the angel returns with the higher angel, who is called Amnael. This higher angel also finds Isis desirable and is willing to trade information. He reveals the mystery of his sign and then swears her to an oath. In this oath, we find echoes of the great mystery and one of the keys to its explication: “I conjure you in the name of Fire, of Water, of Air, and of the Earth; I conjure you in the name of the Heights of Heaven and the Depths of Earth’s Underworld; I conjure you in the name of Hermes and Anubis, the howling of Kerkoros and the guardian dragon; I conjure you in the name of the boat and its ferryman, Acharontos; and I conjure you in the name of the three necessities and the whip and the sword.”

  After this strange oath, Isis is told never to reveal the secret to anyone but her son, Horus, her closest friend. The knowledge will make them one—as the knowledge has now made Isis and the angel one (fig. 2.2).

  And then a curious thing occurs. When the mystery is revealed, it seems strangely flat, as if something was left unsaid in the answer. Horus is told by Isis to watch a peasant, who may or may not have been the mythical boatman Acharontos. He is then given a lecture on “as you sow, so shall you reap.” Horus is told to realize that “this is the whole creation and the whole process of coming into being, and know that a man is only able to produce a man, and a lion a lion, and a dog a dog, and if something happens contrary to nature, then it is a miracle and cannot continue to exist, because nature enjoys nature and only nature overcomes nature.”3

  Figure 2.2. Isis the prophetess.

  Isis goes on to relate that she will now give Horus the secret of preparing certain “sands.” She says: “One must stay with existing nature and the matter one has in hand in order to prepare things. Just as I said before, wheat creates wheat, a man begets a man and thus gold will harvest gold, like produces like. Now I have manifested the mystery to you.”4

  The instruction then passes to hands-on lab work in melting and preparing metals such as quicksilver, copper, lead, and gold. At the end of this lengthy preparation, Isis exclaims: “Now realize the mystery, my son, the drug, the elixir of the widow.”5

  What are we to make of this strange story, with its curiously flat revelations? Possibly our very earliest alchemical text presents us with the same problems and ambiguities that we shall find throughout the entire alchemical corpus. As we unravel alchemy’s secret, we shall return to the story of Isis and the angel, the origin of alchemy. But first we need to follow the trail of those who held this information, the latter-day Heru Shemsu, or the Followers of the Widow’s Son, Horus.

  THE UNDERGROUND STREAM: FROM EGYPT TO THE MIDDLE AGES

  According to Manetho, the second-century Egyptian historian, the Heru Shemsu were the predynastic rulers of Egypt. The Builder Texts at the Edfu temple in Egypt call them the Blacksmiths of Edfu. They declare that all human knowledge came from their endeavors. They invented the institution of kingship, and every pharaoh from Menes to the emperor Trajan ruled Egypt in their name. The winged disk was their symbol, and a special ceremony, “the Union of the Disk,” was held once a year in every temple in Egypt to symbolize the union of the state with the source of Egyptian civilization.

  A multivolume work would be needed to chronicle the record of the Heru Shemsu through three thousand years of Egyptian history. The thread of the Heru Shemsu is clearly interwoven with the basic themes of Egyptian culture and the lost science of alchemy. As the Builder Texts on the forecourt walls at the Edfu temple relate, the Companions or Initiates of Horus were the keepers of the secrets of the Zep Tepi. We can even think of Edfu itself as a kind of time capsule. It was the last major building project of ancient Egypt, finished almost four hundred years after Solon heard the legend of Atlantis, and was purposefully decommissioned and filled with sand in the second century B.C.E.

  With the coming of the Roman Empire and then the Christian Church, the old religion and culture of the Heru Shemsu began to melt away. But it did not simply disappear, for it was absorbed into the spiritual fabric of the new, emerging religions, especially Gnosticism, Christianity, and, later, Islam. Christianity in particular was aided in its growth by its similarity to the Isis cult that preceded it. Alexandria, one of Alexander the Great’s new cities, epitomized this new Egypt and became the center of learning in the late classical world. Alchemy, in its modern form, seems to have developed in its workshops and academies, as the Isis story from the Codex Marcianus shows us.

  The author of “Isis the Prophetess” was probably an Alexandrian Greek who lived somewhere between 50 B.C.E. and 50 C.E. He was familiar with Hebrew and Persian myths concerning angels, and, in the text, he seems to have been trying to communicate something very specific, like a recipe. Undoubtedly, he considered himself one of the Followers of the Widow’s Son, the Company of Horus.

  In another century or so, parts of this myth would become a Christian metaphor. Jesus would be cast in the role of Horus and Mary in that of Isis. As we shall discover in chapter 3, the Christian version of the myth retained many nuggets of the alchemical tradition, particularly among those groups of Gnostics who insisted on direct mystical experience.

  The Gnostic Christians of Egypt were a powerful force in the early Christian m
ovement. It wasn’t until the fourth century, when the Church became an organ of the Roman state, that Egyptian Gnostic forms were driven underground. Until then, Gnostic ideas traveled throughout the Roman Empire, reaching as far as southern France and the west coast of England. As Christianity became an organized orthodoxy, these earlier forms were persecuted and Gnostic ideas began to fade away.

  This Coptic or Gnostic Christianity of Egypt tried to retain the inner core of the ancient Egyptian wisdom while discarding everything that did not fit a strictly Christian mold. It succeeded enormously well, creating an image of the essence of the mystery of alchemy in the symbol of the rose cross.

  In the Old City of Cairo, originally the Roman fortress of Babylon to the southwest of Heliopolis, Coptic Christianity, and its Gnostic roots, survives to this day. Now a part of the sprawling metropolis of greater Cairo, which stretches from the Citadel to the Pyramids of Giza and from Matriyah, site of Heliopolis, to Helwan above Memphis, the Old City is a quaint escape into a medieval garden. Walled on three sides and bounded on the fourth by the vast Christian necropolis, the Old City is an island of piety and mysticism where it is possible to feel that it is the turn of the second century and not the twenty-first.

  On the walls of the Coptic Museum in the Old City, one can trace the evolution of the rose cross through the first and second centuries. On one wall, a first-century gravestone from Luxor (fig. 2.3), which contains the combination of a chi-rho emblem and the ankh with the solar boat, sits next to ankh crosses that blossom into roses on the loop of the ankh (such as that shown in fig. 2.4b). By the second century, this had become the accepted rendering of the cross as a mystical symbol. In this we have a connection with the esoteric side of the Coptic tradition that managed to survive the shift to orthodoxy. These rose crosses traveled, along with Gnostic concepts, throughout the Empire.