The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  We find them in fact in southern France, in the crypt of Saint Honoré at Arles, as Fulcanelli reminds us in his discussion of the ankh.6

  Figure 2.3. The motif of the sacred boat is one that echoes Hendaye’s moon face/boat. Note the chi-rho of Constantine’s vision and the Saint Andrew’s cross on the ship’s mast. First-century C.E. gravestone found at Luxor. (Coptic Museum, Cairo)

  As the ankh merges over time with the rose cross, the center of the ankh’s loop assumes the image of galactic center, a blossoming rose, the Templar cross, the rose as a gnosis gnomon. A series of second-century altar fonts from Luxor, found on another wall of the Coptic Museum, reveals a thread of mystical architecture that unites both the Gothic cathedrals and the enigmatic sixteenth-century credence of the Lallemant mansion in Bourges, which Fulcanelli describes as a “temple in miniature.”7

  Our first font (fig. 2.5), from the early second century, shows a scallop-shell arch supported by two trees, each with twenty-two leaves between, which stands a Coptic ankh with an eight-petaled rose in the loop. The basic simplicity of its symbolism, as we shall see, survived for over twelve hundred years. A late-second-century font (see fig. 2.6) repeats the basic motif and then expands on it to give us an almost complete vocabulary of the mystery.

  Figure 2.4. A, the Coptic rose ankh developed from the chi-rho and ankh combination (from the first century C.E., Luxor); B, shows the central point becoming first a four-eight symmetry (from the first century C.E., Alexandria); C, by the second century C.E., this flowering had evolved to sixteen petals (Luxor). In C, note also the triangle, where three leaves of seven points each meet in the center point, suggesting the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the twenty-two paths on the Tree of Life. (Coptic Museum, Cairo)

  In the center is our arch and scallop shell now supported by pillars rather than trees. Replacing the rose-cross ankh in the center of the arch is an equal-armed cross with an upside-down alpha and omega in the field beneath the transverse arms. On either side of the arch is an ankh with novel elements added. The loop of each ankh contains a five-petaled rose, while equal-armed crosses stand on the top of the elongated side bars, the bottoms of which end in a five-sided leaf shape. At the top of the ankh’s loop is a small triangle, or tetrahedron. Hanging from the outer edge of the arch are two bunches of grapes (See fig. 2.6).

  While a complete explication of this altar font would take us too far ahead of our story, let us note some of the symbolic connections. The arch is found on the facades of the Gothic cathedrals, and is mimicked by the credence in the Lallemant mansion that is discussed by Fulcanelli. The five-petaled rose is also found at Lallemant in the fifteenth-century stained glass above the altar. The A of the inverted alpha matches the A’s on the Hendaye monument. By the early third century, as shown in the altar font in figure 2.7, the inner mystery has become more abstract and orthodox. Instead of a flowering rose-cross ankh, we now find a cubic cross in the place of our Tree of Life. Soon this image would become the chi-rho of imperial Christianity.

  Figure 2.5. This second-century C.E. Coptic altar font, from Luxor, develops the symbolism and numerology from the gravestone shown in fig. 2.4C. Note the twenty-two leaves on each Tree of Life holding the arch. (Coptic Museum, Cairo)

  Figure 2.6. A complex symbolic altar font from second-century C.E. Alexandria that suggests much of the imagery and secrets of alchemy. (Coptic Museum, Cairo)

  Figure 2.7. Altar font from early-third-century C.E. Luxor with the chi-rho and the inverted alpha and omega. (Coptic Museum, Cairo)

  As the Roman Empire fell apart in the fifth and sixth centuries, the various underground groups of Gnostic Christians were left stranded. Even though the Gnostic centers of Alexandria and the East lost touch with the West, the Western Gnostic groups retained the symbol of the rose ankh, and over time this developed into the rose cross, the defining symbol of the underground stream of European esotericism. Fulcanelli’s hint about the rose-ankh sarcophagus lid in Saint-Honoré at Arles points us directly to the mid-first-century Christianity of Provence, and indirectly to the origin of the legends surrounding the Holy Grail.

  In the seventh century, while Europe was still in the Dark Ages, the breeze from Arabia, the new force of Islam, arrived on the scene. Arab scholars discovered the Greek knowledge that had been long since lost to the West. Jabir, the Arab philosopher of the eighth century, collected the ancient alchemical wisdom into a volume that became the cornerstone of all future alchemical research. The Islamic Sufi alchemists of the tenth and eleventh centuries collaborated with the Jewish kabbalists of Spain and reestablished medicine and philosophy.

  Drawing on these sources, Gerbert of Aurillac, who studied in Spain and would eventually become Pope Sylvester II, set in motion a series of events that would result a few centuries later in the Crusades, the persecution of the Cathars, and the Gothic Renaissance. Those books in stone, the facades of the great cathedrals, encapsulate Gnostic eschatology and hermetic philosophy dressed superficially in Christian myth as did the second-century altar fonts of Luxor.

  By the time of the Crusades, the Arabs were far ahead of the West. A few of the Christian Crusaders, including Pope Sylvester’s Chroniclers, were smart enough to know this and learned all they could from Arab culture. Part of what they learned was the secret knowledge. The Knights Templar, the military arm of the Order of Our Lady of Mount Zion, became by the thirteenth century the main guardians of that knowledge.

  When the Templars were destroyed in the early fourteenth century, the secret was fragmented almost beyond repair. By the time the Rosicrucians appeared in the early seventeenth century, alchemy, although still somewhat suspect in the common mind, had been accepted by the new scientific elite. In the next one hundred years, alchemy became chemistry and the secret knowledge became the property of the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and the occultists.

  THE UNDERGROUND STREAM: FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO FULCANELLI

  Dr. W. Wynn Westcott, the medical examiner for the City of London from 1887 to 1898, was a Freemason, an advanced Rosicrucian adept, and one of the founders of the hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, nineteenth-century England’s most notable occult organization. He tells us in an 1890 lecture on alchemy that “it is never taught in so many words. It may dawn on any one of you—the magic event may occur when least expected,” thereby demonstrating that he at least understood that there was a gnostic secret at the core of alchemy.8

  Westcott may be taken as something of an authority. He was steeped in Rosicrucian and Freemasonic ideas, and, in helping to found the Golden Dawn, clearly felt he was part of some larger pattern or process.9 His “flying roll” lecture is therefore of more than passing interest. It was given early in the organization’s history and was presented to the group at large. We can think of it as a preaching-to-the-choir type of exposition of the basic Rosicrucian alchemical tradition.

  The lecture opens with the assertion that alchemy means simply “the Higher Chemistry,” which treats of “the essential nature of the Elements, metals and minerals.” This is a good and direct explanation for the ancient term alchemy that avoids the pitfalls of speculative philology, even if it is otherwise unremarkable. The secret protects itself, but it is safe to say that this strange lecture provides an important cluster of clues and impressions with which to understand how the secret survived from the Templars to Fulcanelli.10

  Westcott quotes from an old French description of the sequence of the alchemical process. “The Sun begins his special form of change in Leo in his own house . . . next Scorpio follows and the Work reaches completion in Sagittarius.” To make sure that we understand, Westcott insists at the close of his lecture: “to perform Alchemical processes requires a simultaneous operation on the astral plane with that of the physical. Unless you are Adept enough to act by Will power, as well as by heat and moisture; life forces as well as electricity, there will be no adequate result.”11

  The source for this secret would seem to be the Rosic
rucian and Freemasonic movements, which had swirled around Europe since the early seventeenth century. The late-nineteenth-century hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a direct descendant of these seventeenth-century secret societies responsible for incubating the alchemical meme.

  Beginning in the fourteenth century, the Black Death ravaged Europe every generation or so until the late seventeenth century.12 As Western Europe strained to deal with these outbreaks, the holders of the secret fragmented even more. At the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, rumors circulated of individual alchemists, most notable among them Nicolas Flamel, and thus began an age of mysterious strangers dispensing alchemical wonders and then fading away into the night.

  Part of the secret, in those troubled times, went underground into chivalric orders funded and organized by some of the leading families of Europe. The court of King René of Anjou in the mid-fifteenth century became a magnet for the lost fragments of the tradition. King René founded an Order of the Crescent based on the mysterious martyrdom of Saint Maurice and the Theban Legion, which grew into an underground stream of esotericism. The alchemical group in Bourges, as shown by the decorations in the Lallemant mansion, was active during King René’s era and made history with the trial of Jacques Coeur, alchemist and royal treasurer accused of treason. This portion of the underground stream influenced the ruling families of Milan and Florence, sparking the Italian Renaissance and inspiring geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Sandro Botticelli.

  Out of these sources, and because of the new freedom found in the collapse of the imperial Church’s intellectual stranglehold and the rise of Protestant dissent, emerged an “invisible college” of esoteric thinkers and scientific research. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the times seemed to be ready for a more public emergence of the secret.13

  In 1614, a publicly printed text appeared of an anonymous manuscript that had been circulating among Europe’s intelligentsia for several years. It was called “The Declaration of the Worthy Order of the Rosy Cross.” Known by its first two Latin words, Fama Fraternitatis, it revealed the purported existence of a brotherhood founded by one Christian Rosenkreuz, who apparently lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

  In the seventeenth century the word philosopher was synonymous with alchemist. Here, with a vengeance, was a “new sect of Philosophers.” The Fama Fraternitatis tells us of the search for occult knowledge by a man called Christian Rosenkreuz. He traveled to the Middle East—Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa—and Spain before returning to Germany to found his secret brotherhood. One hundred and twenty years after Christian Rosenkreuz’s death at the advanced age of 106, one of the brethren discovered his tomb and his uncorrupted body. This was the signal for the Brotherhood to emerge and spread their message, hence the publication of the Fama Fraternitatis.

  Their message, of course, was nothing less than the dawn of a new Golden Age. The Fama Fraternitatis informs us that the Brotherhood possessed the keys to a secret knowledge capable of transforming society and ushering in a new era, one in which “the world shall awake out of her heavy and drowsy sleep, and with an open heart, bareheaded and bare-footed, shall merrily and joyfully meet the new arising Sun.”14 This quote is taken from the next Rosicrucian production, the Confessio Fraternitatis, a restatement of the basic themes but with a more direct emphasis on its revolutionary implications. It also goes to the essence of the alchemical mystery.

  The Rosicrucians were alchemists, but the Fama and the Confessio are both highly critical of the “puffer” type of alchemical worker who sits in his lab and actually attempts to get the mineral gold out of boiling lead. The Fama Fraternitatis talks of “ungodly and accursed gold-making, whereby under the colour of it many runagates and roguish people do use great villainies, and cozen and abuse the credit which is given them.”15 The Fama Fraternitatis implies that the Rosicrucians could make gold but found the higher spiritual alchemy to be more important. Higher spiritual alchemy related to the coming Golden Age and how to prepare for it. That, seemingly, was the intent behind the publications of the first two Rosicrucian documents: to prepare the world for the new era that was dawning.

  The third volume, however, was very different. The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz appeared in 1616 and is the only Rosicrucian document to be claimed by its author, Johann Valentin Andreae, a Protestant minister from Germany. The Wedding is full of occult imagery and surreal metaphors and describes Christian Rosenkreuz’s experiences as he observes a royal wedding.

  Like many alchemical works, the Wedding is filled with ciphers and green language. No less a mind than Leibniz, who along with Newton invented calculus, solved one of the ciphers. In the Wedding, the king announces: “My name contains five and fifty, and yet hath only eight letters.” Leibniz correctly unraveled one layer of this mystery by using a simple Latin gematria, where A = 1, B = 2, and so on, to arrive at the answer of ALCHIMIA.

  The Chymical Wedding is an initiatory text, much like Fulcanelli’s Le Mystère des cathédrales, which cannot be understood without the aid of an esoteric gloss. After this strange work, the original Rosicrucians fell silent. It is not known if they did indeed respond to any of the many thinkers, such as Leibniz, who sprang to their defense. We must assume that if they did, the secret was kept, because the movement continued.

  Westcott’s lecture serves as proof that Rosicrucian ideas retained their continuity through the centuries. This alone is impressive, but it is the continuity of content that strikes us most strongly. We can see continuity of symbolic content even in groups that lost the direct alchemical portion of the secret tradition. Foremost among these are the so-called Freemasons.

  Freemasonry started in England in 1717 with the public announcement of the Four Lodges at the Apple Tree Tavern in London. Something like these “lodges” had existed for centuries as guilds. These Freemasons were different because they weren’t actually working masons but rather middle-class members of a secret society gone public. They claimed Saint John as their patron as they founded their organization on June 24, Saint John’s Day, in 1717. In the next twenty years, lodges were organized publicly all over the British Isles.

  The movement spread to the Continent, even as far as Russia, but it took the oration of Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, given at the Paris Grand Lodge on March 21, 1737, to put the new movement into perspective. According to Chevalier Ramsay, the Freemasons came not from the literal medieval guilds of cathedral builders but from the kings and nobles of the Crusades. They were not actual builders, but instead those who had taken vows to restore the Temple in Jerusalem. These “Templars” formed an intimate link with the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem. The chevalier Ramsay also announced that the order was derived from the mysteries of Isis, Ceres, and Diana, an interesting claim in light of Fulcanelli’s comments on Isis and the Black Madonnas of the Gothic cathedrals.

  As we shall see in later chapters, Chevalier Ramsay was reflecting a real historical tradition, although dressed up in Jacobin finery and strengthened by rumors of secret masters. The Rosicrucian imitators had popularized the idea of hidden adepts, and the mysterious alchemists of the seventeenth century had given it new credence, but the Freemasons were the first to make it an article of faith.

  The idea entered Freemasonry directly with the Strict Observance of Baron von Hund und Alten-Grotkau, who once met a mysterious grand master and was told to wait for further instructions. He waited for the rest of his life, but since the unknown grand master was actually Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the pretender to the throne of England whose cause was crippled forever at the Battle of Culloden Moor, we can understand the lapse. This Strict Observance to an “unknown master,” however, would continue to influence Western occultism down to Theosophy and the Golden Dawn.

  There is no doubt that some of Freemasonry’s traditions and symbols were taken from the Templar tradition. The oration of the good chevalier demonstrates that clearly, but b
y the mid-eighteenth century the movement had discarded these components and become a political and social organization. The symbolism of the temple and the metaphors of the Masons who built it contained the kernel of the alchemical meme, but it is apparent from the lack of alchemical adepts among the Freemasons that the groups themselves did not have the initiatory shock necessary to activate the meme.

  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the secret began to surface once again as advancing scholarship opened up more of the world and the past. Christianity had lost its appeal and its power, and in its place emerged a sort of primitive psychism—spontaneous and unorthodox psychic activity such as trances, visions, speaking in tongues, and so on—resulting in fundamental Christian sects at one extreme and Spiritualism, communication with spirits and the dead, on the other. By the late nineteenth century, Theosophy had revealed that the mysterious masters were to be found in the romantic East, first in Egypt and then in India.

  Fulcanelli changed all of that. One of his main purposes in writing Le Mystère was to reveal many of the inner secrets of the original underground stream and to recover the history of the entire Western tradition.

  The cathedrals of France, especially Notre Dame of Paris, revealed that the tradition was alive and well in the twelfth century when the cathedrals were built. Fulcanelli goes one step further and reveals that the cathedrals are evidence of the full flowering of the Western esoteric tradition in the Middle Ages. This idea, and the proof offered by Fulcanelli, is what really excited the Parisian occultists of the late 1920s.