by Jay Weidner
Boucher moves to the symbols on the base, going west, east, north, and south in a zigzag, forming a crossing pattern that closely resembles a Gothic mason’s mark (see fig. 11.7 on page 323).1 He begins with the western face, which he calls the “devouring sun,” telling us that its sixteen rays suggest the sixteenth trump of the Tarot, The Blasted Tower, an image of catastrophe. While this suggestion is close to the mark, particularly the idea of using Tarot images for the pedestal symbols, it is also an interesting choice, for if one knew that the image had something to do with a catastrophe, one might simply focus on the catastrophe trump without looking any further. The more obvious Tarot trump would be The Sun.
The star image on the eastern side receives the same treatment. Boucher says that it greets the east and has eight rays and therefore symbolizes trump number eight, Justice. On the north side is the moon image, yet Boucher does not follow his Tarot interpretation and suggest that this is trump number eighteen, The Moon. He merely says it is an obscure Egyptian symbol that hides a secret.
The south side contains an image of the Four Ages according to Boucher, but he does not mention the obvious Tarot analogue, The Last Judgment. He gives the Four Ages Ovid’s names, the Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. He concludes that we are living in the Iron Age, full of “crimes and calamities,” but does not offer any predictions of double catastrophes. Indeed, later in the article Boucher says that it is not possible to pinpoint the exact location or time of the catastrophe. But he does predict something dire.2
Perhaps that was all the information he was given, and, not having the whole story, was left to fill in the gaps as best he could. The Tarot suggestions alone point to the fact that Boucher’s sources, if not Boucher himself, understood the importance of the Tarot in deciphering the monument. The attributions that Boucher gives are somewhat off base, as we shall see, but what he leaves out points to the correct attributions. There are obvious Tarot choices for all four faces, which Boucher seems to avoid at all cost. At best, this is curious, and suggests that we are meant to complete his speculation and look deeper for our Tarot images. It is even possible that Boucher planned it that way, with obvious misdirection and gaps in symbolism.
“The Cyclic Cross at Hendaye” is the penultimate chapter of Fulcanelli’s masterpiece (see appendix E for the complete text of the chapter). After wading through thickets of erudition and punning slang in the rest of Le Mystère, this chapter feels awash with the bright sunlight of its Basque setting. The description of the monument and its location is seemingly clear and direct. Even the explanation of the monument’s apparent meaning is simple and virtually free of the green-language code used throughout the rest of the book. Or so it appears on the surface.
“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 symbolical translation of chiliasm, which I have ever met.” Coming from Fulcanelli, this is high praise indeed. He goes on to tell us that “the unknown workman, who made these images, possessed real and profound knowledge of the universe.”
Figure 11.1. The Latin inscription on the transverse arm of the cross, which reads “Hail, O Cross, the Only Hope.”
Fulcanelli continues with a description of the Latin inscription on the transverse arm of the cross. As shown in figure 11.1, the inscription contains seventeen letters in the following order: OCRUXAVES / PESUNICA. As Fulcanelli notes, this translates quite simply as “Hail, O Cross, the Only Hope,” a common Latin mortuary inscription. On the cross, however, the phrase is oddly broken, for the first S in the word spes, “hope,” is found on the first line, and the rest of the word is found on the second, which leaves us with the words aves and pes. This creates an obvious grammatical error. If pes, “foot,” is the correct word, then its adjective should agree in gender and be the masculine unicus, not the feminine unica.
Oddly enough, Fulcanelli does not try to create meaning from this discrepancy. He doesn’t indulge in anagrammatic wordplay, only notes that it was done on purpose. As he says, “[S]ince this apparent mistake exists, it follows that it must really have been intended.” Regarding the meaning of the inscription, he writes, “I had already been enlightened by studying the pedestal and knew in what way and by means of what key the Christian inscription of the monument should be read; but I was anxious to show investigators what help may be obtained in solving hidden matters from plain common sense, logic and reasoning.” Then he moves on to interpret the inscription by reading the Latin as if it were French. The result is “Il est écrit que la vie se réfugie en un seul espace”—that is, “It is written that life takes refuge in a single space.”
It is difficult to take this reading seriously. The transformations of meaning are almost unexplained, except by reference to obscure authors and periodicals, and seem based mostly on a deliberate mistake. Fulcanelli declares: “The letter S, which takes on the curving shape of a snake, corresponds to the Greek khi (X) [or chi] and takes over its esoteric meaning.” This is so odd as to be jarring. In no system of esoteric knowledge have we been able to find any such correspondence as Fulcanelli suggests here. Therefore, it must be a specific attribution, an unusual but precise meaning, used to suggest something important that could not be conveyed without bending the rules.
Fulcanelli continues about the meaning of the S: “It is the helicoidal track of the sun, having arrived at the zenith of its curve across space, at the time of cyclic catastrophe . . . thanks to the symbolic value of the letter S, displaced on purpose, we understand that the inscription must be translated in secret language.” Following his French rendering of the Latin mentioned above, he casually suggests that the phrase means “that a country exists, where death cannot reach man at the terrible time of the double cataclysm.” What is more, only the elite will be able to find “this promised land.”
On very little direct evidence, Fulcanelli is telling us that the cross at Hendaye is a marker stone for some future catastrophe. Fulcanelli continues his survey of the monument, moving to the INRI inscription on the opposite side of the transverse arm of the cross, which he calls the front of the monument. He confuses the order of the images by saying that the INRI corresponds with the “schematic image of the cycle,” the four A’s in the angles of a cross found on the south side of the pedestal.
This could imply that the INRI and the four A’s are on the same side or face of the monument. In fact, this is not the case. The eight-rayed star faces in the same direction as the INRI inscription. Again, Fulcanelli uses a deliberate obscurity to make an important point: “Thus we have two symbolic crosses, both instruments of the same torture. Above is the divine cross, exemplifying the chosen means of expiation; below is the global cross, fixing the pole of the northern hemisphere and locating in time the fatal period of this expiation.”
And then Fulcanelli adds a very strange image: “God the Father holds in his hand this globe, surmounted by the fiery sign. The four great ages—historical representations of the four ages of the world— have their sovereigns shown holding this same attribute. They are Alexander, Augustus, Charlemagne and Louis XIV.” He then states that “[i]t is this which explains the inscription INRI, exoterically translated as Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeorum (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews), but which gives to the cross its secret meaning: Igne Natura Renovatur Integra (By fire nature is renewed whole). For it is by fire and in fire that our hemisphere will soon be tried. And just as, by means of fire, gold is separated from impure metals, so, Scripture says, the good will be separated from the wicked on the great Day of Judgment.”
Fulcanelli supplies us with a footnoted comment on the four sovereigns: “The first three are emperors, the fourth is only a king, the Sun King, thus indicating the decline of the star and its last radiation. This is dusk, the forerunner of the long cyclic night, full of horror and terror, ‘the abomination of desolation.’ ” His esoteric interpretation of INRI, “by fire nature is renewed whole,”
goes directly to the issue of chiliasm and a cleansing destruction as a prelude to a re-created and Edenic world. Alchemy, according to Fulcanelli’s last sentence above, is the very heart of eschatology. Just as gold is refined, so will our age be refined—by fire.
Next, Fulcanelli takes up the images on the four faces of the pedestal. Fulcanelli changes Boucher’s zigzag listing of them to a clockwise list, giving them as sun, moon, star, and “geometric figure.” The illustration accompanying the text (plate 48 in Le Mystère) shows the same pattern. Fulcanelli ignores the sun, moon, and star and spends the last pages of the chapter elaborating on the fourfold nature of the “geometric figure, which . . . is none other than the diagram used by the initiates to indicate the solar cycle.”
It is a simple circle, divided into four sectors by two diameters cutting each other at right angles. The sectors each bear an A, which shows that they stand for the four ages of the world. This is a complete hieroglyph of the universe, composed of the conventional signs for heaven and earth, the spiritual and the temporal, the macrocosm and microcosm, in which major emblems of the redemption (cross) and the world (circle) are found in association.
In medieval times, these four phases of the great cyclic period, whose continuous rotation was expressed in antiquity by means of a circle divided by two perpendicular diameters, were generally represented by the four evangelists or by their symbolic letter, which was the Greek alpha, or, more often still, by the four evangelical beasts surrounding Christ, the living human representation of the cross. This is the traditional formula, which one meets frequently on the tympana of Roman porches. Jesus is shown there seated, his left hand resting on a book, his right hand raised in the gesture of benediction, and separated from the four beasts, which attend him, by an ellipse, called the mystic almond. These groups, which are generally isolated from other scenes by a garland of clouds, always have their figures placed in the same order, as may be seen in the cathedrals of Chartres (royal portal) and Le Mans (west porch), in the Church of the Templars at Luz (Hautes Pyrénées) and the Church of Civray (Vienne), on the porch of St. Trophime at Arles, etc.3
Fulcanelli connects the traditional image of the Four Ages, the cherubic beasts or the evangels, to an ellipse, the vesica piscis or the “mystic almond,” and the letter A or alpha, which suggests that he meant this image to be a direct interpretation of the “geometric figure” of the cross and four A’s. The secret nature of this “complete hieroglyph of the universe” can be found in public view, on the facades of the Gothic cathedrals—for example, in figure 11.2.
On Fulcanelli’s list, however, every cathedral is connected with the cult of the Black Madonna, or ancient goddess worship. While directing us to the meaning of the Four Ages, Fulcanelli is also inspiring us to look closer, to understand why certain places, such as those he lists, are important and how they are related.
Fulcanelli makes sure that the reader follows his main point. After quoting from Saint John regarding the four beasts (Rev. 4:6–7), he then cites Ezekiel’s vision of the “four living creatures” (Ezek. 1:4–5, 10–11). His penultimate paragraph takes up the notion of the Four Ages, or yugas, in Hindu mythology and notes that “our own age,” the Age of Iron, or Kali Yuga, is the time when “human virtue reaches the utmost degree of feebleness and senility,” being “the age of misery, misfortune and decrepitude.” In this passage, Fulcanelli’s comments echo both Hewitt and Max Théon, of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Fulcanelli makes no further predictions other than to note that we are in the Iron Age of the Kali Yuga.
Figure 11.2. A. The twelfth-century tympanum on the porch of Saint Trophime in Arles showing the “complete hieroglyph of the universe.” This image is the concluding plate (no. 49) in Le Mystère des cathédrales. B. The geometry of the traditional medieval schematic for representing Christ surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists is also the design of the New Jerusalem as described in Revelation.
“The age of iron has no other seal than that of Death. Its hieroglyph is the skeleton, bearing the attributes of Saturn: the empty hourglass, symbol of time run out, and the scythe, reproduced in the figure seven, which is the number of transformation, of destruction, of annihilation,” Fulcanelli instructs us. “The Gospel of this fatal age is the one written under the inspiration of St. Matthew.” He follows this observation with a group of Greek words related to the basic mu-alpha-theta root of the name Matthew, connecting it to the words for “science,” “knowledge,” “study,” and “to learn.” “It is the Gospel according to Science, the last of all but for us the first, because it teaches us that, save for a small number of the elite, we must all perish. For this reason, the angel was made the attribute of St. Matthew, because science, which alone is capable of penetrating the mystery of things, of beings and their destiny, can give man wings to raise him to knowledge of the highest truths and finally to God.”
On the surface, Fulcanelli’s chapter takes us little further toward our goal of understanding the Hendaye cross than Jules Boucher’s 1936 magazine article. Fulcanelli adds the explicit warning of an imminent catastrophe, a season of double catastrophe that will try the northern hemisphere by fire, and the hope of a place where “death cannot reach man at the terrible time of the double catastrophe.” He relates the Vedic idea of the four yugas to the Western prophetic tradition of Revelation and Ezekiel. By aligning his apocalyptic traditions, Fulcanelli points the reader toward a few important symbolic clues: Saturn and the Gospel of Matthew.
In chapter 3, we saw that Matthew gives us the most complete view of Jesus’ teachings on the end of the world and the coming Kingdom of Heaven. Matthew was someone who grasped the mystery at the core of Christianity, for it is from him that we hear of Jesus’ Egyptian connections, the Star of Bethlehem and the journey of the Wise Men from the East, the Massacre of the Innocents, the temptation of the Messiah, and many other stories with deep esoteric significance.
Matthew 24:43–44 suggests that those who follow the Son of Man will indeed be able to calculate the time, and so be waiting in preparation. When he returns (25:31), he will separate the sheep from the goats, the subtle from the gross, on the basis of their compassion for their fellow men. In Matthew, we also find the account of Mary Magdalene’s witness to the Resurrection, complete with its own light metaphor. “His appearance was like lightning,” we are told, and Mary does not at first recognize him.4 Matthew’s account of the Resurrection ends with Christ’s Ascension in Galilee and his pronouncement of the Great Commission, the last line of which goes to the heart of the mystery: “And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the world.”5
Fulcanelli announced that the cross at Hendaye points to the “great Day of Judgment,” and that the seal of this moment in time is Death, with the attributes of the planet Saturn. This suggests that Saturn will somehow play a role in marking the end of this fourth age, a very unusual and productive idea, as we shall see a little later.
In The Fulcanelli Phenomenon, K. R. Johnson included a chapter on the Hendaye cross by someone called “Paul Mevryl.” Entitled “Epilogue in Stone,” this commentary on the Hendaye cross raises as many questions as it answers, not the least of which is who is “Paul Mevryl”? In the introductory blurb, we are told that Mevryl “is a retired engineer, has an interest in cryptograms and has studied alchemy, Fulcanelli and other areas of arcane knowledge for many years.” In the text, Mevryl assumes a tone that suggests that if he is not Fulcanelli’s heir, he is at least his equal. Whoever he is, and he is as anonymous as Fulcanelli, Mevryl is in on the game, and, with this article, became one of its major players.
Following Boucher and Fulcanelli, Mevryl confirms the apocalyptic content of the monument, and then spins off into a science-fiction story about exploding suns and moon-size ark-ships. His explanation of the pedestal images becomes a somewhat murky discussion of planetary exchanges, first interstellar, involving Sirius, which he calls, suggestively, “the Sun behind the Sun,” and then within the solar
system, involving Venus. This is so strange as to make a reader pause in amazement, if not give up entirely. Alchemy, as a subject, is absent from the article, which focuses solely on eschatology and catastrophe. His goal is simply “to lift a corner of the veil obscuring one vehicle of that teaching.” Mevryl suggests that this division between alchemy and its eschatological content “is both interesting to the casual reader and helpful to the student of hermeticism.” And indeed, Mevryl’s article is very helpful, but only when you know the secret. Otherwise, it obscures more than it reveals.6
But Mevryl does know something: “The Cyclic Cross at Hendaye is a statement in stone about The Stone and a record of the fact of success in the Great Work by an unknown man. Simultaneously, it is an observation upon the nature and timing of tremendous world events involving yet another kind of stone.” And his first, and perhaps most significant, question is: Why is the cross even at Hendaye? Concerning the alchemist-builder of the monument, Mevryl notes that “[t]here is certainly no other indication that it was the scene of his triumph, except in the possibility that it was so because the monument was originally erected in the local cemetery.”
At this point, Mevryl makes one of his leaps, suggesting that the cause might be Hendaye’s closeness to the pilgrim route to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Spanish Galicia. He mentions Nicolas Flamel in passing and then focuses on the green-language meaning of the Hendaye name itself. He breaks it down into “Hen Day–End Day–Ande” or “Egg–Apocalypse–Mountain,” and suggests that this multiple meaning of the word Hendaye was a determining factor in its choice. And he squeezes in another reference to Flamel: “The Egg is the philosophical Egg of alchemy, reminding us of Flamel’s ‘little poulet.’ This place name demonstrates the presence at Hendaye of a double teaching.”