The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye Read online

  As the mystery unfolded and the puzzle appeared before us, Jay and I were astonished that no others seemed to have seen this. And then we realized that of course they had. We had stumbled on the big secret, the grand MacGuffin of human history. All of humanity’s psychodramas seemed to have the secret at their core, even when knowledge of the secret was limited to the initiated few. From this perspective, what we had been taught to regard as history looked a lot like the residue of a millennia-long global conflict over control of the secret and its ramifications. As we researched this story, three main currents or groups emerged. These currents, perhaps better described as collective viewpoints, we defined by their relationship to the secret.

  The first group, which we shall call the Priest-Kings, believed it had the right to possess the secret based on ancient traditions and bloodlines. In contrast to this basically Osirian position, and making up the second group, were the nihilistic Sethians, who wanted to possess the secret exclusively and were willing to destroy everything to get it or to keep anyone else from getting it. The ancient myth of Osiris, the rightful king, whose power is usurped by his evil brother, Seth, and then avenged by his son, Horus, echoes this struggle over control of the secret. The myth retains its power even today, as witness the success of Disney’s The Lion King.

  In between these extremes, in some moral and social gray area, are the Opportunists, the group that is willing to own the secret, use the secret, control the secret, or whatever it takes to provide for its own wealth, power, ego gratification, and so on. We have few mythological metaphors for this group because it is recent, developing only in the last two thousand years. All three of these groups are mutually antagonistic, yet interdependent. None of them wants the others to gain complete control, yet none can gain it alone. But most of all, none of them wants to share information with uninitiated outsiders.

  Someone in the late seventeenth century, however, built an enigmatic mortuary monument in the quaint Basque coastal town of Hendaye. More than 250 years later, an equally mysterious author, Fulcanelli, would add a new chapter to his thirty-year-old book claiming that the “Cyclic Cross of Hendaye” was the ultimate expression of “chiliasm” (a belief in the Last Judgment as a literal end of time) as well as a description of the Great Work of alchemy. These simple facts point to several interesting conclusions.

  Not only have the initiated few survived for centuries, right down into our own time, but apparently some of them wanted to reveal the secret as well. Interesting as these conclusions are, they force us to an even more dramatic one. If one of the initiated gave away the secret in 1957, it could only have been because the secret was in danger of being lost, or, even worse, co-opted and distorted. By 1957, the balance of power had shifted, and the nihilistic Sethians scented final victory in the Cold War breeze.

  To understand the importance of Fulcanelli’s message, we must remember that by the late 1950s it must have seemed, to those in the know, that something fundamental had changed. The Sethians and the Opportunists had finally learned to cooperate. The Priest-Kings, with their mystical connections, had almost been destroyed. The Sethians were in the process of convincing the Opportunists of the need for mass suicide by way of an atomic war. The secret of the end of time and the possible transformation of the human species were in danger of being lost, forgotten, or changed beyond recognition.

  The value of Fulcanelli’s revelation can be seen in the amount of misinformation and distortion that obscures any discussion of the person or of his work. Even Johnson’s Fulcanelli Phenomenon, the only major work on the subject in English, reads like a mass of purposeful confusion, which is epitomized in its penultimate chapter, a bizarre science-fictional analysis of the Cyclic Cross by someone called “Paul Mevryl.” From the information presented in this work, we might be forgiven for thinking that, while not quite a con man, Fulcanelli and his disciple Canseliet were perhaps as deluded or delusional as any other alchemist of the past.

  And yet, when we read Mystery of the Cathedrals, we find no confused charlatan rambling on about imagined esotericisms. We come face-to-face with one of the most penetrating intellects of the twentieth century. The power of this intellect appears, especially in Cathedrals, to be driven by an urgent need to communicate the outlines of a great mystery. In delineating this mystery, Fulcanelli tried, by piling up images and allusions, to suggest a vast initiatory process at work in human history. At the core of the book, though, is a question.

  The first edition, published in 1926, ended with the question unanswered, although a glimpse of the answer can be seen embedded within the brilliant synthesis of ideas at the heart of Mystery of the Cathedrals. By the time of the second edition, 1957, the question had been answered. Fulcanelli decided to reveal the secret of the end of time. When the book was reprinted, he added a new chapter that was more about chiliasm than alchemy and in which he sketched out the ground rules for solving the puzzle of the Cyclic Cross of Hendaye.

  Five years later, Morning of the Magicians, by Pauwels and Bergier, became an international bestseller. In many ways, this was the start of the New Age movement and the beginning of the process of obscuring Fulcanelli and his work. This occulting would continue in numerous books and articles about enigmatic events and unsolved mysteries by Colin Wilson and others. The Fulcanelli Phenomenon, published in 1980, compounded the problem and convinced most readers that any mystery having to do with the cross of Hendaye was simply paranoiac delusion. Perhaps that’s what the book was intended to do.

  And here matters remained until Jay and I rashly and naively decided to solve the puzzle. Like some esoteric Tar Baby lurking at the astral crossroads waiting for a couple of happy-go-lucky Brer Rabbit–type researchers to come along, the monument’s mystery proved irresistible once touched. We were stuck with it—all the way to the briar patch.

  The quest took us from Elberton, Georgia (where a mysterious R. C. Christian has built a monument to the end of time), to France, Peru, and Egypt. Along the way, we were aided by so much synchronicity and coincidence that we eventually concluded there was a fourth current or group at work, behind the scenes, that actually wants the secret revealed to as many people as possible. This Free Will party, as we jokingly called it, seemed to be guiding our research and at times manipulating events.

  That Jay and I got together at all was the result of complex personal synchronicities that spanned decades and ended with us both, for the most unlikely and absurd reasons, being in Boulder, Colorado, during the fall of 1997. As we started out almost as far apart geographically as it is possible to be and still be in the United States—I live in central North Carolina and Jay lived at that point on the coast of Washington in the Pacific Northwest—Boulder was like meeting halfway.

  Deciphering the monument’s message turned out to be the easy part. Once we had the message, deciphered in one rush of comprehension on a stormy Halloween night high in the Rockies, our emphasis shifted to finding out what it meant. The monument pointed to a specific time period, the intersection point of several celestial cycles, and we wanted to know exactly why Fulcanelli had described this event as a “double catastrophe” in which the northern hemisphere would be tried by fire—Judgment Day, in other words.

  And that’s where the real synchronistic fun and games began. Books, necessary volumes that we needed to see but didn’t even know existed, began to appear: Once an extremely rare book miraculously turned up after access was denied us, and once, even more synchronistically, a key book was left behind in a smoking lounge at Heathrow Airport for us to find. Beyond the source texts, authorities began to show up—a local Boulder publisher announced a new edition of Fulcanelli’s Dwellings of the Philosophers and let us read the translation as it proceeded. Dr. Paul LaViolette arrived for a conference and redirected our whole perspective. William Sullivan, John Major Jenkins, Dr. Alberto Villoldo, and Dr. Juan del Prado appeared at crucial moments and added their pieces of the puzzle.

  Perhaps the most prominent synchr
onicity of all centers on the image of the rose-cross ankh. Several years before Jay and I met, I had every rose-cross ankh in the Coptic Museum in Cairo photographed in an attempt to trace the idea in early Christianity. By coincidence, we discovered in Arles and at the Louvre a series of rose-cross ankhs that would have been completely mysterious without the images from the Coptic Museum.

  Fulcanelli’s use of the word chiliasm gave us a clue to their meaning. Chiliasm is a Gnostic conception of the Christian Last Judgment in which a new existence, a new spiritual reality, supersedes our flawed common reality at the end of time. Many scholars, such as Elaine Pagels and Ioan Couliano, consider chiliasm to be the most sophisticated of the many first-century eschatological perspectives. Chiliasm was never declared heretical and survived as a belief in the Coptic Church. The ankh, symbol of eternal life, with the blooming flower at its center, represented the chiliastic ideal of the Second Coming as a renewal of all life.

  The Egyptian origin of this concept suggested to us the antiquity of its insight. Following this thread, we found evidence that alchemy, as we have known it historically, is actually a demonstration of the transmutational physics at work in the galactic core, and was apparently know to the ancients. The inner core of alchemy appears in this light as the ability to apply the physics of creation to the task of personal immortality. And with this knowledge, of course, would come the ability to survive the double catastrophe.

  If the secret, the grand MacGuffin of human history, is the ability to chart the celestial timing of the eschatological event, then the only serious questions become: “Is it true?” and “Can we survive?”

  After compiling and sifting through a huge amount of research, we can definitively answer the first question: Yes, it’s true. We are about to receive a cosmic wake-up call from the center of the galaxy.

  As for the second question—Will the celestial event bring extinction or enlightenment?—the answer remains open. The existence, however, of a fourth current, the Free Will, share-the-information party, suggests that there is an answer.

  Perhaps human evolution, once certain physical parameters, such as the size of the skull versus the width of the mother’s hips, are reached, becomes an internal, personal process of initiation. Defining this personal process is a galactic wave of change that brings the opportunity of transformation to those who have reached the required level of internal transmutation. To those who haven’t reached this level, perhaps it brings madness and destruction, perhaps even a global catastrophe, in its wake.

  Because of the politics of secrecy surrounding the knowledge of this oncoming celestial event, we, as a culture, have been blissfully unaware of its approach. Eschatological speculations long ago became the property of cranks and fringe religions. Science has given the appearance of abdicating its responsibility for interpreting its own findings. And yet, the knowledge, the gnosis, survived the secrecy and persecution and is now on the verge of becoming once again a common cultural perspective.

  The fourth current, the Free Will party, might just have won out after all.

  VINCENT BRIDGES

  It has long been believed that the Gothic cathedrals were secret textbooks of some hidden knowledge; that behind the gargoyles and the glyphs, the rose windows and the flying buttresses, a mighty secret lay, all but openly displayed.

  —WALTER LANG, INTRODUCTION,

  LE MYSTÈRE DES CATHÉDRALES

  WELCOME TO THE WORLD’S GREATEST MYSTERY. It has everything—clues and ciphers, red herrings, and consciously enigmatic jokes. There are villains, victims, and heroes littering the plot line, along with unreadable books, inscrutable monuments, and strange unearthly figures that flit along through the ages as if they had a purchase agreement on eternity.

  At the heart of the great mystery story interwoven through the whole tapestry of human history lies the Gnostic science of alchemy. In truth, this ancient science little resembles our modern view of it as a protoscience practiced by deluded and mercury-crazed visionaries. Intellects as great and as different as Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, and Carl Jung have found important truths within the alchemical tradition and perspective. Newton, in fact, wrote more on alchemy—although much of it has yet to be published—than he did on any other subject. Jung spent the last decades of his life unraveling the “Western yoga” he had glimpsed amid the jumble of alchemical metaphors. There is something about this strange subject that invites the curious, the intelligent, and the creative.

  Yet the image of the medieval “puffer” foolishly working away at his furnaces in vain attempts at turning lead into gold remains in our modern iconography. This view appeals to our sense of scientific smugness, and it allows us to dismiss the tradition itself as a discredited and archaic hypothesis. But what if the tradition contains a core of truth, and what if the “puffers” are no more deluded than the modern historians of science who confidently pigeonhole alchemy as a precursor to chemistry? What if “alchemy” is something far different from what most of us have ever dreamed?

  And what if that core of truth touches upon the deepest and most important issues of the human condition?

  ONE

  THE FULCANELLI MYSTERY

  THE APOCALYPSE, THE LOST GENERATION, AND THE REDISCOVERY OF ALCHEMY

  Nearly one hundred years after the fact, World War I, or “the Great War” to those who lived through it, feels as ancient as all the other wars that came before it. Our only connections with that conflict may be faded sepia-toned images of our ancestors who marched off to fight for reasons vaguely understood, even to them. Demoted in stature by an even greater war, the First World War became merely the prelude to a century of destruction and horror. Reading of the ideals and passions of that long-forgotten era, with its hopes for glory on the battlefield and the romance of nationalism, feels embarrassing to us now. If we think of it at all, we assign the Great War an emotional value somewhere between a massive industrial accident and the migration of lemmings to the sea.

  And yet, looking back through history, we find many wars and disasters, plagues and conquests, volcanic eruptions, climatic changes, and mass migrations, but we find nothing quite like the Great War. It was unique. War up to that point had been an extension of politics; now it became just another industrial and mechanized product, taking on a life of its own in the trenches of the Western Front. Four hundred years of European intellectual, moral, and technical superiority created the engines of this industrialized murder, this mass-produced slaughter of the innocents. These technological wonders consumed the very social order that had created them. After four years, the self-proclaimed masters of the universe, Europe’s young, the best and the brightest of all the old empires and republics, lay broken and bleeding in the wasteland saved from ultimate extinction only by the interference of the United States and its revolutionary democracy.

  Was this cultural suicide, perhaps? An apocalypse by any other name is still an eschatological event; it is the end of the world for the inhabitants of that world. For example, near the end of the Great War, in September 1918, the Turkish Twelfth Army, holding the ridgeline in front of Damascus that included the ancient mound of Meggido, was attacked and destroyed by the combined use of airplanes, tanks, and cavalry. This battle, apparently, and eerily, described in chapter 16 of the Book of Revelation, suggests that Armageddon occurred in 1918.

  Not only is the battle described in the biblical text, but it also occurred in the midst of the worst plague since the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the so-called Spanish influenza of 1917–19. Revelation’s apocalypse looks much like the history of the twentieth century, leading up to one final millenarian explosion at or just beyond its end. Could this be true? Could the prophetic events of Saint John’s Revelation be a description of an ongoing process, a season of destruction that essentially started with the Great War?

  When the Great War finally ended, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the Old World, with its noble and imperial ways,
was truly dead. The “victorious” Allies propped up the corpse of old imperial Europe and, using all the tricks of the undertaker’s trade, gave it the brief appearance of animation. After the treaty was signed at Versailles, it decomposed soon enough. But while it lasted, through the 1920s and into the 1930s, this zombie summer of fast-fading European superiority galvanized the world.

  The epicenter of this fleeting corpse-light renaissance was Paris, the City of Light. During the war this city had been the goal for which millions of men had marched, fought, bled, and died, from the taxicabs of Paris that helped create the Miracle of the Marne until those final days in the late spring of 1918 when the German long-range artillery shells fell in the streets. As it had been for centuries, Paris was a symbol, to both sides in the conflict, of something irrepressible in the human character. After the war, it became a mecca for all those who felt that the world must be changed somehow by the horror and sacrifice of the war, and that this change must mean something, say something, and do something. People came to Paris like insects drawn to the light, having burned their candles all at once in the final auto-da-fé of European civilization. They firmly believed that out of that conflagration would come a better world.

  And so they came to Paris to help create that world: mystics, visionaries, painters, poets, artists of all kind, scientists, political thinkers, revolutionaries, all looking for that new world of hope, peace, and freedom that, so they felt, must grow out of “the war to end all wars.” Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, published after his death, gives a vivid account of the era. “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast,” Hemingway commented.1