The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye

by Jay Weidner

  This close juxtaposition of the Grail myth, in a possibly original form, with the heart of the Cathars’ theosophy in just seven short verses of one mystical text serves as conclusive proof of the close connection among all three traditions. In case more proof is needed, let us look at verse 190, the beginning of this amazing sequence.

  Here we find the original of the “Precious Stone of the Wise.” When God created Light, it was so intense that life could not develop. God then shaped the extra light into a great stone, into which he engraved the Tree of Life and the world itself, what the Bahir calls the Ultimate Future. This stone was passed down through the family of Abraham until, rejected, it passed to the descendants of Jacob and disappeared into Egypt. This, the Bahir informs us, is the stone the builders rejected that will become the chief cornerstone of the new Temple. Wolfram is making the same point with his “lapsit exillis” pun; the stone is all of these things—the stone of exile, the stone that fell from heaven, the stone of eternal life, and the stone of the heavens, literally a crystallization of the leftover light of creation.

  ELIJAH, ESCHATOLOGY, AND THE UNDERGROUND STREAM

  The Bahir, as we have seen, provides the link among the Cathars, the Grail romances, and the Templars. But the question of why the sages of the Bahir decided to go public at just that moment remains unanswered. Given the political situation, we may be sure the step was not taken lightly. There must have been some compelling and overwhelming reason why such a momentous undertaking was attempted. Secrecy was ingrained in the tradition; the work was taught privately and transmitted only from master to student. Suddenly, the secret was out, written down and circulated far beyond the usual small family groups. Why take such a risk?

  The answer lies in the message of a mysterious visitor, and provides the link between alchemy and eschatology. Starting around 1150, a series of strange encounters between provençal kabbalists and an enigmatic visitor identified as “Elijah the Prophet” triggered a surge of eschatological speculations. No less a personage than Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquières, son-in-law of the chief rabbi of Narbonne, received a life-changing visit from Elijah the Prophet. The last recorded such visit was to Rabbi Jacob “the Nazarite” from Lunel around 1170. Rabbi Jacob was a mystic and ascetic with close connections to the Cathars and the local provençal tradition—going back traditionally to Mary Magdalene—of cave-dwelling anchorites.66

  Elijah’s message was simple. Around the year 1216, a new era of revelation would unfold, ushering in the third and last cycle of the age. Forty years of preparation were required to open the new era, so 1176 was chosen as the publication date of the Bahir, the work that contained the secrets of transmutation.67 This key bit of eschatological information can also be seen as the driving force behind the Grail romances and the Cathars. Both seemed to expect a new era, with a new form of Christianity, to dawn in the near future.

  But once the secret was out, others began to pick up on Elijah’s message. One of the most significant was Joachim of Flores. Joachim was born into the minor nobility in Sicily around the time Abbot Suger began the renovation of Saint Denis in the early 1140s. In the mid-1160s he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he became converted to a variety of mystical Christianity not too dissimilar to the mysticism of the Bahir. After a few years as a hermit on Mount Etna, Joachim returned to Italy, joined the Benedictines, and became a Chronicler at the Order of Zion’s influential monastery at Casamari (House of Mary) in Calabria.68

  Joachim’s visions began around 1183, and soon after he was summoned to Rome by Pope Lucius III and encouraged to record his visions and his theories. From this recognition, Joachim became a star, the most authoritative spokesman of his age on the imminent last days. He felt that his knowledge and visions imposed a heavy sense of obligation to spread the news of the impending apocalypse.

  Convinced that political events such as the schism in Zion and the encroaching power of the Roman orthodoxy and its struggle with the Holy Roman Empire portended an imminent close of the second age, Joachim retreated to his own mountaintop monastery on Mount Nero, high above the Sila plateau in northern Italy. There he was consulted by the great of his era, including Richard the Lion-Hearted. Joachim told Richard that the Antichrist had already been born. Given that the date, 1191, was roughly the time when Tamujin began his rise to become the Genghis Khan of the Mongol horde, Joachim may have been right.69

  His calculation placed the end of the second age at around 1260. By this date, fifty-eight years after Joachim’s death in 1202, several apocalypses, such as the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade, the Crusade against the Cathars, and the conquest of the Middle East by the hordes of Genghis Khan and his sons, had indeed happened. Eighty-seven years after Joachim’s target date, the worst apocalypse since Noah’s Flood swept the world—the Black Death.

  In spite of Joachim’s acceptance during his life, after his death the Church condemned his views and his writings. Since that time, Joachim has been treated as both a saint and a heretic, but his views retained their popularity in esoteric circles down to the twenty-first century.

  The sages of the Bahir published their work, at the urging of the mysterious Elijah, because they saw that the world was descending into a period of darkness. The arrival of the Mongol hordes and the death of many Sufi sages, such as Ibn Al Arabi, combined with the genocide of the Cathar Crusade, confirmed this view.70 The world was a much darker place in 1260 than it had been in 1160, and by 1360, in the depths of the Black Death, it must have seemed that the apocalypse had indeed arrived.

  And what of the sages of the Bahir who had thrown in their lot with the Cathars? They had fared only slightly better by their target date of 1216. Thankfully most of the original sages did not live to see the persecutions of the early thirteenth century, the community had been driven underground and out of Provence. The son of Rabbi Abraham, Isaac “the Blind,” whom Elijah had visited in the 1160s, led the community in 1215, at the height of the Cathar persecutions, from Provence to Gerona in the Pyrennees northwest of Barcelona. Here, shielded from the Inquisition, the community continued to spread the new mystical doctrine of the Kabbalah across Europe.

  In his last, unfinished fragment, the Titurel, which was completed a half century later by Albrecht von Scharffenberg,71 Wolfram tells us that the Grail was taken to a miraculous castle in the Pyrenees, built to serve as home for the Grail, which until then had “no fixed place, but floated invisible in the air.” A temple was built to house the Grail atop the solitary Mountain of Salvation. In Albrecht’s description it is a combination of the Bahir’s Precious Stone, the Cube of Space, and the Tree of Life, a sort of New Jerusalem model of the temple of the cosmos. There are hints here of both the Bahir sages’ move to Gerona and the Cathars’ last stronghold at Montségur, which was constructed at roughly the same time and is less than one hundred miles from Gerona.

  After the final destruction of the Cathars, the school at Gerona also faded away. The Grail romances lost their appeal, and cathedral construction eventually ran out of funds and inspiration and ground to a halt. In the fifteenth century, Grail knight René the Good of Anjou, and count of Provence as well, rediscovered part of the tradition and labeled it the Stream of Arcadia. In the sixteenth century this idea of an Arcadian underground stream would appear in the works of Sir Philip Sydney and Shakespeare and in the seventeenth century in painters such as Poussin. Even Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in “Kubla Khan,” mentions the mythic river Alph (or Alephus), which goes underground in Asia Minor and was said to surface at Arcadia in Greece, or at the Fountaine de Vaucluse in the Ardèche, according to Petrarch.

  The theme continues down to Le Mystère. In the discussion on the image from the Great Porch at Notre-Dame-de-Paris labeled “The mysterious Fountain at the foot of the Old Oak,” Fulcanelli concludes his overview of the key points of the secret wisdom with a quote from the sacred well at Notre-Dame-de-Limoux, in the heart of the Cathar country of Languedoc only about fifty miles
from Montségur.

  But there are still some unanswered questions: If the Grail romances derived from Jewish and Catharist sources promoted by the Templars in southern France, why do they appear as part of the Matter of Britain? And even more significant, how did these ideas come to be incorporated into the Gothic cathedrals?

  The latter will have to wait until chapter 7, but the former can be answered by referring once again to the chronology of the era. By the mid-1170s, the Cathars had attained both organization and stature from the Council of Toulouse, but had not yet been seriously attacked by the Roman Church. The Templars were at the peak of their influence in both Outremer and Provence, negotiating a deal with Frederick I Barbarossa that would make them independent of even papal authority. In this climate, it is easy to see why the Bahir group felt it safe to publish their work.

  If we can agree that Chrétien represents an early kind of Cathar troubadour, then the decision had already been made to camouflage Catharist teachings in a Celtic mode. Catharism seemed to be the correct religion for the court of love at Camelot, and the Matter of Britain, unlike the classical or Carolingian epic cycles, allowed its poets and listeners to approximate reality in a mythical way while relating those myths to everyday events around them. Arthur’s court, and Britain, for that matter, was far enough removed that it could serve as a land of the imagination, yet near enough to be familiar.

  The archetypal Arthur of Celtic myth, the high king who sailed to the Land of the Dead and retrieved the cauldron of regeneration, was the common property of the entire Celtic West, from Toulouse to Tara. The high king of the Volcae at ancient Toulouse was an “Arthur” figure, as was the fifth-century high king of the Bretons, Rhiotomas, who fought against the Roman Empire. Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in 1130, made Arthur into a real historical figure, and ensured the Cathars’ appreciation by noting that his shield carried the image of the Virgin and setting him up as the foe of Rome. These details recur in Chrétien’s early Arthurian work from the mid-1170s.

  When the original Grail text of Guyot, possibly the new text of the Bahir with some genealogical material added, was revealed to the inner circle at the coronation of Frederick at Arles in 1178, it was simple common sense to continue the cover story by going along with Geoffrey’s “Breton” origins for the story. This subterfuge did not save the Cathars. They were proclaimed anathema by the Roman Church the following year, 1179, and soon the persecutions increased.72 But it did save the core of the alchemical Grail of the Bahir by providing an untouchable cover for the stories themselves.

  By the time Wolfram finished Parzival, the Cathars were being slaughtered by the Church and there was no longer any need for hiding. Wolfram names the guardians as Templars, places the source of the story correctly in Spain, Provence, and the Pyrenees, and gives us, in his Wilhelm, a possible Grail lineage connecting Parzival with the paladins of Charlemagne and the heroes of the First Crusade. He even makes explicit the “stone” metaphor from the Bahir, and he insists on an Eastern connection that has been variously seen as Jewish or Islamic, or both.

  Wolfram had nothing to hide, and even as the Grail romances faded away, the inner truths and metaphors so courageously revealed by Chrétien and Wolfram coalesced into the imagery on the front of the Gothic cathedrals. The mysterious book and stone so beloved of the Templars, the Cathars, and the alchemists became public books of stone, open to all who could read their symbolism. As we shall see in chapter 7, the cathedrals of Our Lady designed and built between 1150 and 1260 were the “houses” in which the Divine Presence communed with its beloved souls trapped in matter. The cathedrals were nothing less than an attempt to make a living model of the Stone of the Wise, a new chapel of the Grail and a temple of the cosmos.

  SEVEN

  TEMPLES OF THE COSMOS, CATHEDRALS OF THE GODDESS

  THE HERMETIC CATHEDRALS

  And so, at long last, we arrive at the point where Fulcanelli began, the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. In his 1926 Mystery of the Cathedrals, Fulcanelli claimed that the Gothic cathedrals were hermetic libraries in stone with the secret of alchemy displayed for all who could understand to read. When our investigation began, this seemed, in its own way, the most incredible of all Fulcanelli’s claims. It was easier to believe that someone had stumbled privately onto the real secret behind the alchemical transformation than it was to believe that some secret society, or societies, had encoded this information deliberately into the design and the decorations of the greatest of all Christian monuments.

  For the belief that the Gothic cathedrals are alchemical texts in stone to be true, several important preconditions would also have to be true, such as the existence of a secret, or not-so-secret, group with access to the highest levels of the Church, bottomless wealth, connections with the Holy Land and the Muslim world, and knowledge of alchemy. Before we, as researchers, could take Fulcanelli’s claims seriously, we needed to validate the existence of such a group. The importance of this point is obvious. If Fulcanelli was merely projecting from his own unconscious the meanings he gives certain images and motifs found in the cathedrals, rather than revealing an ancient alchemical tradition, then Mystery of the Cathedrals would be not much more than a work of symbolist fantasy—interesting, and useful to the psychologist perhaps—but of limited value in terms of alchemy.

  Yet this is, if anything, Fulcanelli’s main point. Mystery of the Cathedrals is not the usual alchemical cookbook or grimoire, for Fulcanelli implies that he is revealing the mystery of alchemy as it was taught to him, by reference to the hermetic meanings embodied within the cathedrals. Mystery of the Cathedrals is therefore a demonstration not just of the alchemical philosophy, but also of how this philosophy animated a lost medieval Golden Age. The key to understanding Fulcanelli’s importance, and not just the value of his work, lies in the reality of this lost knowledge and the fact of its emergence as symbols on the walls of these churches.

  We began our search with the origin of alchemy and discovered that alchemy, while containing the knowledge of a pre-catastrophe civilization, appeared in its modern form as part of the Gnostic ferment of the first century C.E. This Gnostic worldview, derived from the mystery cults of the ancient world, supplied a theological and mythological framework for the emerging wave of monotheistic mysticism as practiced by traditions such as Christianity and Essene Judaism. This framework also contained the essential ideas of alchemy’s triple transformation. The specific magical technology of the triple transformation—inner yogic disciplines, magical ceremonies combined with manipulation of sacred metals, and the secret of time and timing, including the beginning and end of time—developed first within the Gnostic cults, including Christianity, and then dispersed into the intellectual underground of the Dark Ages.

  As part of this paradigm, alchemy was influenced by Gnostic eschatological teachings, such as the path of return by the small lights to the One Light. Two thirds of the transmutational secret was persecuted out of orthodox and Western Christianity, while the remaining one third of the secret, that of time itself, was co-opted by its temporal leaders, such as Constantine, Charlemagne, and Otto I. For the Christians, the whole idea of the end of time became confused with the fall of the Roman Empire, and the apocalypse against heretics became an institution of the Church. But the idea of a transformed reality, the chiliast vision of a new heaven and a new earth purged of sin, refused to die.

  This chiliast concept of a spiritually animated matter became the keystone of the alchemical process. The illuminated Hebrew mystics of the Bahir recorded the techniques for animating matter and related them to the transformational process of galactic alignment. The Shi’ites, Fatimids, and Ismailis alike believed that Muhammad had received this information and passed on the secret of time and the coming of the Day of Judgment through the family of Ali. The Sufis, of all persuasions, retained the most complete understanding of the internal yogic transformation. Any successful alchemist faced the daunting task of uniting in his own understanding these
widely separated fragments in order to complete the Great Work.

  We found that by the tenth century, alchemical knowledge had declined to the point that the chiliast secret of animating matter had effectively been lost. The Byzantine Greek compilations of that era are composed of older material, much of it from the first century, such as the “Isis the Prophetess” text. The Islamic current had split into the compilers and philosophers versus the mystical and the political wing. Among the Jews of the Diaspora, knowledge of the Bahir was limited to several small family groups in Spain and Jerusalem. The information had been on the verge of vanishing before 1100, and it was hard to see how in a few short decades it could have been revived and then become influential enough to appear on the cathedral walls. But apparently it had.

  Working backward from the cathedrals themselves, we found that there were indeed enough mysteries to drive a small army of secret societies through. “Why did western Europe build so many churches in the three hundred years after the year 1000? What need was there, in a Europe with hardly one-fifth of its present population, for temples so vast that they are now rarely filled even on the holiest days? How could an agricultural civilization afford to build such costly edifices, which a wealthy industrialism can barely maintain?” Will Durant asked these questions in his chapter on the Gothic cathedrals in his History of Civilization (volume four of The Age of Faith).1

  And who designed them? Who decided on the artwork, laid out the ground plans, and supervised the construction and the decoration? These are mostly unanswered, and now unanswerable, questions. We know the names of these “master masons,” but their history and the story of their work have for the most part been lost. But the fact of that work, its skill and symbolic integrity, points to the sophisticated degree of organization, perhaps even on an international level, required to produce such elaborate and long-term projects. Buildings of such complexity and elegance do not happen by accident.