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Chapter 1
The Nature of the Quest
The Ancient Secret Science Revealed
Many literary critics seem to think that a hypothesis about obscure
and remote questions of history can be refuted by a simple demand
for the production of more evidence than in fact exists. […] But the
true test of a hypothesis, if it cannot be shown to conflict with
known truths, is the number of facts that it correlates and
explains.
Cornford,
Origins of Attic Comedy
Disjecta Membra
The theme of the Quest for the Holy Grail is so much a part of
Western Culture that it would be difficult to even imagine its
absence. The number of books, paintings, sculptures, plays, movies,
popular songs and other artistic or literary expressions that deal
with the “matter of the Grail” are too numerous to even count.
The
Holy Grail represents many things to many people, but in general we
could say that it represents the Quest for All and Everything. This
attitude has crept into our language when we say, “Oh, he’s
searching for the Holy Grail of _____”.
You can fill in the blank
with about any field of endeavor. Everyone who considers the
subject, even momentarily, is certain that, at the core of the
Legend is a secret and/or some ultimate prize of a material nature.
It could even be said that the attachment Western Society has to the
Legends of the Grail is really all out of proportion to the actual
confusing content of the stories themselves.
In fact, many people
who are certain that there is a deep meaning to the Legend of the
Holy Grail haven’t even read the original stories that gave birth to
that legend.
Yet, something acts on us - each and every one - to trigger the
imagination, the soul, whenever the subject comes up; and this
suggests that there is some vital thing - some magic - some mysterious
archetypal dream - that the very words “Holy Grail” awakens in the
spirit of Western peoples. It activates something in our collective
unconscious, transforming the muddled and confusing elements of the
original stories into an enchanted land of heroic love and mighty
feats of derring-do that can only be performed by the purest and the
best; and all of us - in our most private fantasies - dream that we
are “The One” who can achieve the Grail.
Anyone who studies the matter of the Grail already knows that there
are literally multiple thousands of scholarly and/or imaginative
works on the subject. There are essays, studies, criticisms - volumes
of them - devoted to this fascinating subject. The student of Grail
literature also knows that these endless treatments of the subject
present an almost hopeless muddle of contradictory opinions and
perspectives. For example: there is one school of thought that
proposes the Grail to be an entirely “Christian matter”.
There are
undeniably Christian elements that dominate certain versions. Then,
there is the school of thought that claims that the Grail matter is
essentially pagan, and most definitely of Celtic provenance. They
point out that the later Christianized versions were attempts by
ecclesiastics to “cover-up” and amalgamate a popular theme to
Christian purposes. These two are the broadest divisions, but no
means the only ones!
Each group can be subdivided into branching
schools, holding forth on any of dozens of theories.
The problem is that each of these two perspectives and their many
subsets are faced with insurmountable problems when trying to
promote their individual arguments. The theory of the Christian
origin of the Grail breaks down completely when confronted with the
most distressing fact that there is no Christian tradition
concerning a “Joseph of Arimathea”.
It seems that Joseph does not
exist outside of the Grail stories and must be relegated - by
Christianity - to romantic fantasy. In fact, as Jessie Weston
reported, as early as 1260, the Dutch writer, Jacob van Maerlant
denounced the whole Grail issue as “lies”, declaring that the Church
knew nothing of it. And he was right. The Pagan-Celtic advocates
have to face their own difficulties when dealing with the legends.
The part of the Grail stories that can be proven to be definitely
pagan and Celtic - the Perceval story - in its original form, has
nothing to do with the Grail at all!
So the problem is this: while parallels can be found for one or
another feature of the whole cycle of stories when taken in
isolation, this cannot serve a broad overview because to derive
parallels necessitates breaking the stories up into a group of
independent themes. There is no “Q” document, as is theorized for
the Gospels of the New Testament - a lost original source from which
different elements are drawn. There is no prototype with all the
elements in one story - the Waste Land, the Fisher King, the Hidden
Castle with its otherworldly feast and mysterious vessel and
maidens, the Bleeding Lance and Cup.
In short, for either the pagan-Celtic or Christian perspective,
there is just no original source that has preserved all of the
elements together. What this means is that the most logical approach
to take to the subject is to understand at the outset that neither
school of thought can ignore the other and that a broader approach
is needed. This means that the origin of the Grail story must be
somewhere other than in popular legends or Christianized tales.
Jessie L. Weston, after more than thirty years of study, wrote a
little book entitled From Ritual to Romance.
She noted therein an
observation that was startling in its implications:
Some years ago, when fresh from the study of Sir J. G. Frazer’sThe
Golden Bough, I was struck by the resemblance existing between
certain features of the Grail story, and characteristic details of
the Nature Cults described. The more closely I analyzed the tale,
the more striking became the resemblance, and I finally asked myself
whether it were not possible that this mysterious legend - mysterious
alike in its character, its sudden appearance, the importance
apparently assigned to it, followed by as sudden and complete a
disappearance - we might not have the confused record of a ritual
once popular, later surviving under conditions of strict secrecy?
This would fully account for the atmosphere of awe and reverence,
which even under distinctly non-Christian conditions never fails to
surround the Grail.[…]
The more closely one studies pre-Christian Theology, the more
strongly one is impressed with the deeply and daringly spiritual
character of its speculations, and the more doubtful it appears that
such teaching can depend on the unaided processes of human thought,
or can have been evolved from such germs as we find among the
supposedly ‘primitive’ peoples. […]
Are they really primitive? Or
are we dealing, not with the primary elements of religion, but with
the disjecta membra of a vanished civilization? Certainly it is that
so far as historical evidence goes our earliest records point to the
recognition of a spiritual, not of a material, origin of the human
race.
The Folk practices and ceremonies studied - the dances, the rough
Dramas, the local and seasonal celebrations, do not represent the
material out of which the Attis-Adonis cult was formed, but
surviving fragments of a worship from which the higher significance
has vanished.
My aim has been to prove the essentially archaic character of all
the elements composing the Grail story rather than to analyze the
story as a connected whole.21
21 Weston, Jessie L., From Ritual to Romance (London: Cambridge
University Press 1920) pp. 3, 4, 7,
10.
Let me repeat those two most important statements: The “disjecta membra of a vanished civilization”, and “surviving fragments of a
worship from which the higher significance has vanished".
In short,
what Ms. Weston has proposed is that the Grail Stories were a brief
emergence into the general consciousness of something so ancient
that finding the threads and re-weaving the whole cloth of the
Sacred Tapestry might require a perspective of not merely thousands
of years, but possibly tens of thousands of years - antediluvian,
even!
The very thought of something so daring in scope literally
took my breath away. However, being naïve and something of a fool
willing to rush in where angels fear to tread, I made the decision
that I was going to search for the pieces to this puzzle if it took
me the rest of my life.
Upon considering this idea as a hypothesis, I began to imagine how
such an event might manifest. I came across another interesting item
that helped me adjust the “lens” through which I was viewing
reality. There is a story found in the History of Herodotus, which
is an exact copy of an original tale of Indian origin except for the
fact that in the original, it was an animal fable, and in Herodotus’
version, all the characters had become human. In every other detail,
the stories are identical.
Joscelyn Godwin quotes R. E. Meagher,
professor of humanities and
translator of Greek classics, saying:
“Clearly, if characters change
species, they may change their names and practically anything else
about themselves.” 22
22 Godwin, Joscelyn Arktos, (Kempton Illinois: Adventures Unlimited
Press, 1996).
Going further still, Mircea Eliade clarifies for us the process of
the “mythicization” of historical personages. Eliade describes how a
Romanian folklorist recorded a ballad describing the death of a
young man bewitched by a jealous mountain fairy on the eve of his
marriage. The young man, under the influence of the fairy, was
driven off a cliff. The ballad of lament, sung by the fiancée, was
filled with “mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic
beauty”.
The folklorist, having been told that the song concerned a tragedy
of “long ago”, discovered that the fiancée was still alive and went
to interview her. To his surprise, he learned that the young man’s
death had occurred less than 40 years before. He had slipped and
fallen off a cliff; in reality, there was no mountain fairy
involved.
Eliade notes that “despite the presence of the principal witness, a
few years had sufficed to strip the event of all historical
authenticity, to transform it into a legendary tale”. Even though
the tragedy had happened to one of their contemporaries, the death
of a young man soon to be married “had an occult meaning that could
only be revealed by its identification with the category of myth”.
The myth seemed truer, more pure, than the prosaic event, because
“it made the real story yield a deeper and richer meaning, revealing
a tragic destiny”.
In the same way, a Yugoslavian epic poem celebrating a heroic figure
of the fourteenth century, Marko Kraljevic, abolishes his historic
identity, his life story is “reconstructed in accordance with the
norms of myth”. His mother is a Vila, a fairy, as is his wife. He
fights a three-headed dragon and kills it, fights with his brother
and kills him, all in conformity with classical mythic themes.
The historic character of the persons celebrated in epic poetry is
not in question, Eliade notes.
“But their historicity does not long
resist the corrosive action of mythicization.”
A historic event,
despite its importance, doesn’t remain in the popular memory intact.
“Myth is the last – not the first – stage in the development of a
hero.”
The memory of a real event survives perhaps three centuries
at best, as the historic figure is assimilated to his mythical model
and the event itself is blurred into a category of mythical actions.
“This reduction of events to categories and of individuals to
archetypes, carried out by the consciousness of the popular strata
in Europe almost down to our day, is performed in conformity with
archaic ontology”, Eliade writes. “We have the right to ask
ourselves if the importance of archetypes for the consciousness of
archaic man, and the inability of popular memory to retain anything
but archetypes, does
not reveal to us something more than a resistance to history
exhibited by traditional spirituality?”
23
23 Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of The Eternal Return; (New York:
Bollingen Foundation, Princeton University Press 1954) pp. 40, 43,
44, 46.
This mythicization of historical personages appears in exactly the
same way in all times and cultures. As it says in the Book of
Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun”. Historical
events are “assimilated” to the mythical archetype, and things that
were never done by the hero are often assigned to him. Events,
places and other characteristics of the “larger and deeper” context
are also “attached”.
What this suggests is that mythicization of historical persons takes
place in accordance with some “exemplary standard” This is why all
of the mythical heroes resemble one another in so many respects.
It’s not that each and every one of them did the same things; it is
that somebody did something - at least one thing - that was heroic and
therefore belonged to the exemplar. By so doing, they were
“assimilated” to the archetype.
We are not suggesting that the real
heroes or historical characters did not exist or that they did
nothing heroic. That is not in question. What seems to be evident is
that their real, historical nature - what they really did - cannot
resist the “corrosive action of mythicization”. Therefore,
discovering the identity of any hero by trying to compare his story
to actual historical “facts” just simply will not work.
And there is
something else important to consider here: if a fairly ordinary
“hero” and his collection of localized deeds are “assimilated” to an
exemplar, even if we do discover his identity, it means very little.
We have only discovered one of many, many individuals assimilated to
the same archetype, and we risk going around in circles forever,
trying to sort the facts, in order to discover some “magical
artifact” that is connected to the exemplar. In some instances the
tribal memory can “hold” a recollection of an ancestor’s name, even
if they have no clue about what that ancestor really did in complete
terms. In other cases, the real name is forgotten and the name of
the exemplar is attached.
This may not seem to be much help in
figuring out who really did what, but, with care and patience and
comparison, we can come to some logical conclusions about the past,
before written historical records based on facts were written down - or before the original written accounts were destroyed - which is
another distinct possibility.
Another point that is crucial to our investigation is that myths do
tend to preserve the ideas of institutions, customs and landscapes
even if we cannot rely on them for what we would call personal
historical truth. And finally, what we perceive from studying myths,
legends, sagas, and epics is the evident fact that they are not
“creative inventions” of whole cloth. There is a model. There is a
reduction of events to categories and individuals to archetypes, and
this model is
in conformity with archaic ontology! It could even be said that
mythicization of historical persons lays bare for us the meaning of
the person and event - meaning that can only be seen by withdrawing
from the immediate historical event.
This leads us to ask the
question:
“Does this tendency of the consciousness of man to retain
archetypes and assimilate historical events and people to those
exemplars reveal something to us about the true nature of the
Exemplar itself?”
“What is the true nature of the Exemplar?”
This is going to be a
very important question to remember as we go along. It will assist
not only in understanding how stories from various sources can be
both true and not true at the same time. It is also going to be a
major clue in our investigation of certain very important matters
that will come into play as being pivotal in the Grail Quest. Is
there a level of reality at which the Exemplar exists and which
impresses itself upon humanity in broad psychological terms?
In
other words, does the mythical archetype refer to a Theological
Reality, a hyperdimensional realm, from which our own is “projected”
like a movie, and in which we live and move and have our being like
game pieces on a board?
As we study the Grail stories in comparison to other myths and
legends, we notice the ubiquity of the universal theme of a Golden
Age, which was destroyed in some terrible way - a deluge, a fall from
grace, a punishment. We suspect that Geoffrey of Monmouth interwove
this tradition cleverly with the story of King Arthur. In most
cases, the stories talk about the world before, giants, the Gods and
their doings, in terms that seem to be utterly fantastic.
The usual
explanation ascribes such stories to any number of theories based on
the fearful and ignorant state of the howling savages of the Stone
Age who imaginatively created myths to explain the inexplicable
forces of nature around them.
Many “alternative” researchers and theorists have already expounded
at great length on the idea that many myths represent an archaic
reality. Among the ideas they have proposed are those that follow
the pattern that there was a time in human history when the planets
interacted violently and these became the foundational myths of the
“wars of the
Gods”. In such scenarios, the “thunderbolts” of Jove
are the exchanges of electrical potentials between planets.
Others
have proposed that such stories represent the interactions of aliens
or alien-human hybrids with advanced technology. In these theories,
the “thunderbolts” of Jove are nuclear weapons and Jove was just a
regular guy with a big bomb.
After considering our little story about the mythicization of
history and the historicization of myth, we have some idea that both
of these approaches could be true. In the case of the Grail Stories,
we are dealing with the same problem many times over. However, in
the Grail stories, there are repeated references to the same symbols
or “objects of cultic value”. These mysterious objects form the
central theme of the action of the story of the quest, and it seems
that a true understanding of these objects is as essential to the
hero himself as it is to the modern day “seeker of mysteries”.
The
objects are a cup or dish, a lance or sword, and a stone. If we
begin to search through myth and legend, finding one of them here,
another there, and then reassemble these elements, we come to a
certain idea: that they all are part of an ensemble.
But what does this ensemble of elements really represent?
When we
consider these elements carefully, and study them, we come to the
idea that an ancient scientific knowledge might be what is being
portrayed in these stories, and how such knowledge might be
“mythicized” over time if the infrastructure of civilization were
destroyed. Naturally, the story Lord of the Flies immediately comes
to mind as one example, but there are certainly many other
situations where this process can be examined. In any event, the
more we examine this matter, and the more examples we study, the
more we realize that Ms. Weston was definitely onto something.
Let us consider the “Grail Hallows”, appearing repeatedly in myth
and legend, as elements of an ancient technology. Let us observe how
these objects were utilized, and the magical powers that were
attributed to them. Let us note that all of these abilities were the
attributes of a mastery of Space-Time manipulation. Keeping in mind
that that myths DO tend to preserve the ideas of institutions,
customs and landscapes. If this is so, the ancient legends are a
stunning view of the universe as well as descriptions of very
exciting technology.
So, let us proceed with this idea as a working hypothesis. We don’t
have to accept it as true, let’s just play with it.
Imagine, if you will, a worldwide civilization similar in many ways
to our own with advanced technology (though the technology of the
ancient world was obviously quite different, as we will see).
Imagine further that the imminent threat of a great cataclysm is
realized too late to make proper preparations to preserve the
civilization itself; or, perhaps the calamity is so devastating that
it cannot be preserved. Imagine that the infrastructure of the
civilization is destroyed. Imagine that, over the entire globe, out
of say, six billion people, only 10 million survive, so terrible is
the cataclysm.
Furthermore, the survivors themselves are so widely
scattered, and all means of travel and communication have been
destroyed, so that any idea of them gathering together to
re-implement the infrastructure that formerly existed is impossible.
What is more, many of those who survived are not even technically
capable of doing so.
But, in four or five locations, a small handful of people with
higher educations did survive. However, the unfortunate thing is,
their education is so specialized that they are able to re-implement
only limited and selected elements of the former civilization. And
so, they do the best they can. They become the Lords of the Flies,
so to speak, and they seek to find a way to re-create what was lost;
to seek out the additional knowledge, to rebuild the world from the
ashes.
Having only uneducated and technically deficient people to do all
the necessary work, and knowing that when they die, what they do
know will be lost, they attempt to pass on as much knowledge as they
can to as many as they can, knowing that even this is incomplete.
Or, conversely, they create an “elite power structure” where the
knowledge is only dispensed to a very few in order to keep the reins
of power in their own hands and the hands of their descendants.
In such a situation, what knowledge would be considered the most
valuable to pass on? What would be foremost in the mind of such a
person?
Well, the progenitor of a power hungry elite would certainly pass on
knowledge that would perpetuate the Control of others. But an
individual who wishes to help humanity as a whole might be thinking
that a better world may come if they can only pass on what they
know, and leave it up to those who come after to add the missing
pieces.
Would not this knowledge be the important things about the
civilization itself? It’s infrastructure? It’s modes of
communication, of travel, of laws and ethics; its high science; and
most of all, the terrible information that was revealed at the very
last, just before everything was blasted back to Stone Age
conditions: the knowledge that
the earth regularly and cyclically
undergoes cataclysm.
Imagine the sighting of an oncoming disaster, such as a barrage of
comets, in our own civilization. The first thing our scientists
would do would be to make measurements and observations; study path
and trajectory; and soon they would announce on television, to the
world, that we are about to go through a dangerous period that,
apparently, is part of a long period cometary shower.
They would
announce their numbers to the world, and everyone would know, just a
short time before the destruction, that what they are facing has
been here before. And that knowledge, revealed too late, would be
the one thing that the survivors of such destruction would want to
pass on to their children. And so, in such an environment, under
such conditions, myths would be born consisting of memories of the
world before and all its glorious technology, how it ended, and that
disaster will come again.
Imagine, if you will, a group of survivors.
They emerge from their
place of safety to find that the world that they knew is not just
damaged, but that the violent convulsions of the planet have folded
over, ground up, and washed away most of what formerly existed. The
factories, the power plants, the cities, the superhighways, the
railway lines, the airports and airplanes, the great ships and
industrial complexes - all reduced to twisted bits of iron,
incinerated wood, and concrete that has been ground into gravel.
With what skills they have, lacking anything but the most
rudimentary hand-made tools, they build their little community and
try to survive in the best way they can.
As time goes by, our little community of survivors is doing well.
They have grown old, and now they sit around the fires with a new
generation of little ones gathered around to hear stories of “what
did you do when you were young, grandpa?”
And the grandfathers sigh
with longing for the ease and comfort and marvels of all that was
lost, and answer:
“We went out to dinner at fine restaurants and
watched movies.”
“What is a movie, Grandpa?”
“Well, it is a big place where everybody used to go to see famous
movie stars having wonderful adventures. Everybody would sit in a
row of seats and the movie would appear on a big white wall in front
of us.”
“What appeared on the wall?”
“The images of the movie stars.”
“What is a movie star, grandpa?”
“A movie star is a famous person who pretends to be someone else in
order to tell a story.”
“What is an image, grandpa?”
“It’s a sort of projection of the real movie star who is not
actually there. They live somewhere else, and when they are not
acting in movies, they have ordinary lives.”
“How does it happen that the image of the movie star can be seen
when they are not really there?”
“Well, that’s technology. It has to do with a light that is shone
through a long piece of transparent stuff that runs around a wheel.”
“What runs the wheel, grandpa?”
“Electricity.”
“What is electricity, Grandpa?”
“It’s a great force that is in the air. Electricity is what you see
when you see lightning. When we were little, we used electricity to
make everything work. It was the power that made our lights come on.
It was what we used to cook our food. We used electricity to run our
stereos and radios and televisions.”
“Grandpa, what is a television?”
“It’s a sort of box and the images of the same movie stars that you
see in a theater can be seen right in your own house.”
“How do the images get into the television?”
“They come through the air. There were satellites floating high in
the air around the world that sent these images into the television.
The same satellites also helped us to be able to talk to anybody
anywhere in the world on a telephone.”
“Grandpa, what’s a telephone?”
We will leave this most interesting question and answer process and
jump now to a time when Grandpa has gone to his reward, and the
grandchild has grown up and has children.
He is telling his own
children about the stars in the skies that send messages into boxes
and make it possible for anyone to talk to anyone else anywhere in
the world. He also is telling his grandchildren about the great
movie stars in Hollywood who could appear on a blank wall in a big
theater after a big banquet with the Gods, or, under special
circumstances, if the Gods choose to speak from the heavens, in a
special box in a person’s very own home.
Skip another generation, and we have the community falling upon hard
times. They remember the stories of the world before, and it seems
that they need help. Perhaps if they build a replica of the box like
object that was so important a part of the time of plenty, they will
be able to communicate with the Gods in Hollywood who will then
bring the famine or plague to an end.
So, they build a box and set it on an altar. They begin to call upon
the different names they remember from the grandfather’s stories.
“Oh, great mother Elizabeth Taylor! Hear our plea! Come to help us
great father Clark Gable!” But nothing happens. Perhaps the Gods are
angry? Maybe they want something? How about a sacrifice? Some wine,
perhaps? Maybe the Gods miss the banquet part? They want a nice
succulent lamb. No? Well, how about a newborn infant? A virgin? Two?
A dozen or so?
And so, as time goes by, the facts of what existed before become
little more than fairy tales, clues to a former time, buried in
layers of ignorance and superstition. And as the populations grow,
and travel is undertaken, they meet tribes with similar stories but
from different angles. Perhaps they meet a group whose “grandfather”
was a great scientist. He taught his grandchildren to memorize
scientific formulas.
Naturally, because their grandfather was a
scientist and passed “scientific and superior knowledge” to them,
they feel that they are in a position to instruct those ignorant
rubes that are invoking Liz Taylor and Clark Gable. No, indeed, it
must be done this way: you have to form a circle around the
television and say the right words, the magical formulas.
And so,
the combined tribes begin to dance around the “Cube of Space”,
chanting,
“Eeee equals Emmmm Ceeee squared! Eeee equals Emmmm Ceeee
squared! Eeee equals Emmmm Ceeee squared! We appeal to the great God
of Ein-Stein! Speak to us!”
And if they do it long enough, they will induce the production of
certain brain chemicals, which will lead to states of ecstasy, and
there you have it! The proof that it works. And so, we have our
legends of great occult science in the making.
I’m sure that the reader can take these short vignettes even
further, and see how the memory of the golden age was passed down,
and how myths, if they were properly examined and analyzed, could be
the key to finding the threads of an ancient technology, the
disjecta membra of a lost civilization.
However, that is not to say that there were not some groups who did
actually manage to re-create some of the technology. It seems
evident that some scientists, some technocrats, survived and were
responsible for the sudden emergence of the civilizations that we
know in our recorded history. It is also equally likely, human
nature being what it is, that the very progenitors of these
civilizations became the elite, and as often happens, when the elite
take advantage of the masses, revolutions come about destroying the
very wellsprings of that knowledge.
Also, as noted, there were probably others who sought to preserve
the knowledge, encoded for the future time when only a revival of
technology would make any of it comprehensible. This brings us to
another line of thought.
In 1984, the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation and a group of other
institutions commissioned Thomas A. Sebeok, to elaborate answers to
a question posed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The
American government had chosen several desert areas in the US for
the burial of nuclear waste. The idea was that it was easy to
protect it from intrusions at the present time, but since they were
dealing with deadly elements which had half-lives of ten thousand
years or more, how to protect people in the future from destroying
humanity by dangerous intrusions into such areas?
Ten thousand years
is more than enough time for great empires and civilizations to rise
and perish. In just a few centuries after the last pharaoh had
disappeared, the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs had
disappeared as well, so it is conceivable that mankind could be
reduced to a “dark age” existence that came into being following the
decline of the Golden Age of Greece, and the fall of the Roman
Empire. The question was: How will we warn the future about the
danger?
Umberto Eco discusses Sebeok’s findings:
Almost immediately, Sebeok discarded the possibility of any type of
verbal communication, of electric signals as needing a constant
power supply, of olfactory messages as being of brief duration, and
of any sort of ideogram based on convention. Even a pictographic
language seemed problematic.
Sebeok analyzed an image from an ancient primitive culture where one
can certainly recognize human figures, but it is hard to say what
they are doing dancing, fighting, or hunting?
Another solution would be to establish temporal segments of three
generations each, (calculating that, in any civilization, language
will not alter beyond recognition between grandparents and
grandchildren), giving instructions that, at the end of each
segment, the message would be reformulated, adapting it to the
semiotic conventions prevailing at the moment. But even this
solution presupposes precisely the sort of social continuity that
the original question had put into doubt.
Another solution was to fill up the entire zone with messages in all
known languages and semiotic systems, reasoning that it was
statistically probable that at least one of these messages would be
comprehensible to the future visitors. Even if only part of one of
the messages was decipherable, it would still act as a sort of
Rosetta stone, allowing the visitors to translate all the rest.
Yet
even this solution presupposed a form of cultural continuity,
however weak it would be.
The only remaining solution was to institute a sort of ‘priesthood‘
of nuclear scientists, anthropologists, linguists and psychologists
supposed to perpetuate itself by co-opting new members. This caste
would keep alive the knowledge of the danger, creating myths and
legends about it. Even though, in the passage of time, these
‘priests’ would probably lose a precise notion of the peril that
they were committed to protect humanity from, there would still
survive, even in a future state of barbarism, obscure but
efficacious taboos.
It is curious to see that, having been presented with a choice of
various types of universal language, the choice finally fell on a
‘narrative’ solution, thus reproposing what REALLY DID HAPPEN
MILLENNIA AGO (my emphasis). Egyptian has disappeared, as well as
any other perfect and holy primordial language, and what remains of
all this is only myths, tales without a code, or whose code has long
been lost.
Yet they are still capable of keeping us in a state of
vigil in our desperate effort at decipherment.
24
24 Eco, Umberto, The Search For The Perfect Language, (Oxford:
Blackwell 1995) p. 177, emphasis mine.
It is extraordinarily significant to me that Eco has suggested so
clearly here the idea that our ancient ancestors may have been faced
with the knowledge of a very great peril to mankind and
“brain-stormed” for a solution as to how to transmit this
information to future generations. And it is with this idea that we
come back to the myths that formed the foundation for said religions
and form a “working hypothesis” that such stories are the
“narratives” provided by our ancestors to warn us about something,
as defined by Thomas Sebeok in his report to the Office of Nuclear
Waste Isolation.
And here we find the problem: We cannot just read
these things, put the pieces together like a regular puzzle and
thereby discover the answer.
We have to deeply analyze the stories,
discover the various versions and their inversion; and, by tracking
the roots of words, discover their relations. In such a way, we just
MIGHT be able to discover what it is our ancestors knew and what
they have so desperately tried to tell us.
Alchemy and the Enclave in the Pyrenees
Nowadays, our materialistic science derides alchemists as misguided
mystics who followed a dream of discovering a substance that could
transform base metals into gold. Yes, they admit that much
scientific discovery was accomplished in
these pursuits, but they toss out the objective of the alchemists as
just a pipe dream.
Nevertheless, there are interesting stories
there, some so deeply curious that the mind cannot grapple with the
implications, and they are immediately discarded as too fantastic
for serious consideration. I want to recount a few of them here so
that the reader who is not familiar with the literature might be
sufficiently intrigued to do research on his/her own.
But first, a short discussion of the “Philosopher’s Stone”. This is
the goal of the Alchemist; a fabled substance that can not only
transmute metals into gold, but can heal any illness, banish all
sickness from a person’s life, and confer an extended lifespan, if
not immortality, on the body. At least, that is how it is described.
That may or may not be a “cover story”.
It was thought that, by a lengthy process of purification, one could
extract from various minerals the “natural principle” that
supposedly caused gold to “grow” in the earth. In an anonymous 17th
Century alchemical text, The Sophic Hydrolith, this process is
described as “purging [the mineral] of all that is thick, nebulous,
opaque and dark”, and what would be left would be a mercurial “water
of the Sun”, which had a pleasant, penetrating odor, and was very
volatile.
Part of this liquid is put aside, and the rest is then mixed with a
twelfth of its weight of “the divinely endowed body of gold”,
(ordinary gold won’t do because it is defiled by daily use). This
mixture then forms a solid amalgam which is heated for a week. It is
then dissolved in some of the mercurial water in an egg-shaped
phial.
Then, the remaining mercurial water is added gradually, in seven
portions; the phial is sealed, and kept at such a temperature as
will hatch an egg. After 40 days, the phial’s contents will be
black; after seven more days small grainy bodies like fish eyes are
supposed to appear. Then the “Philosopher’s Stone” begins to make
its appearance: first reddish in color; then white, green and yellow
like a peacock’s tail then dazzling white; and later a deep glowing
red. Finally, “the revivified body is quickened, perfected and
glorified” and appears in a beautiful purple.
This and many similarly obscure and crazy sounding texts are the
bulk of Alchemical Literature. It occurred to me early on that these
texts were a code, and so I persisted in reading many texts of this
kind and searching for clues there and in the stories of the
alchemists themselves. It was in reading the anecdotes about
so-called Alchemists that I became convinced that there was, indeed,
something very mysterious going on here.
For example: In 1666, Johann Friedrich Schweitzer, physician to the
Prince of Orange, writes of having been visited by a stranger who
was “of a mean stature, a little long face, with a few small pock
holes, and most black hair, not at all curled, a beardless chin,
about three or four and forty years of age (as I guessed), and born
in North Holland.”
Before I finish the story, it needs to be pointed out that Dr.
Schweitzer, who was the author of several medical and botanical
books, was a careful and objective observer and was a colleague of
the philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. Schweitzer was a trained scientific
observer; a reputable medical man, and not given to fraud or
practical jokes. And yet, what I am about to describe is, in modern
understanding, impossible.
Now, what happened was that the stranger made small talk for awhile
and then, more or less out of the blue, asked Dr. Schweitzer whether
he would recognize the “Philosopher’s Stone” if he saw it. He then
took out of his pocket a small ivory box that held “three ponderous
pieces or small lumps... each about the bigness of a small walnut,
transparent, of a pale brimstone colour”. The stranger told
Schweitzer that this was the very substance sought for so long by
the Alchemists.
Schweitzer held one of the pieces in his hand and asked the stranger
if he could have just a small piece. The man refused, but Schweitzer
managed to steal a small bit by scraping it with his fingernail. The
visitor left after promising to return in three weeks time to show
Dr. Schweitzer some “curious arts in the fire”.
Well, as soon as he was gone, Dr. Schweitzer ran to his laboratory
where he melted some lead in a crucible and added the tiny piece of
stone. But, the metal did NOT turn into gold as he anticipated.
Instead, “almost the whole mass of lead flew away, and the remainder
turned into a mere glassy earth”.
Three weeks later, the mysterious stranger was at his door again.
They conversed, and for a long time the man refused to allow Dr.
Schweitzer see his stones again, but, at last “he gave me a crumb as
big as a rape or turnip seed, saying, receive this small parcel of
the greatest treasure of the world, which truly few kings or princes
have ever known or seen”.
Schweitzer must have been a whiner because he recounts that he
protested that this was not sufficient to transmute as much as four
grains of lead into gold. At this, the stranger took the piece back,
cut it in half, and flung one part in the fire, saying: “it is yet
sufficient for thee!”
At this point, Schweitzer confessed his theft from the previous
visit, and described how the substance had behaved with his molten
lead. The stranger began to laugh and told him,
“Thou are more dextrous to commit theft than to apply thy medicine; for if thou
hadst only wrapped up thy stolen prey in yellow wax, to preserve it
from the arising fumes of lead, it would have penetrated to the
bottom of the lead, and transmuted it to gold.”
The guy leaves at this point and promises to return the next morning
to show Schweitzer the correct way to perform the transmutation but,
The next day he came not, nor ever since. Only he sent an excuse at
half an hour
past nine that morning, by reason of his great business, and
promised to come at
three in the afternoon, but never came, nor have I heard of him
since; whereupon I
began to doubt of the whole matter. Nevertheless late that night my
wife... came
soliciting and vexing me to make experiment... saying to me, unless
this be done, I
shall have no rest nor sleep all this night... She being so earnest,
I commanded a fire
to be made - thinking, alas, now is this man (though so divine in
discourse) found
guilty of falsehood... My wife wrapped the said matter in wax, and I
cut half an
ounce of six drams of old lead, and put into a crucible in the fire,
which being
melted, my wife put in the said Medicine made up in a small pill or
button, which
presently made such a hissing and bubbling in its perfect operation,
that within a
quarter of an hour all the mass of lead was transmuted into the ...
finest gold.
Baruch Spinoza, who lived nearby, came the next day to examine this
gold and was convinced that Schweitzer was telling the truth. The
Assay Master of the province, a Mr. Porelius, tested the metal and
pronounced it genuine; and Mr. Buectel, the silversmith, subjected
it to further test that confirmed that it was gold. The testimony of
these men survives to this day.
Now, either ALL of them are lying, or Dr. Schweitzer really did have
a strange experience exactly as he describes it. The interesting
thing is that other people have described similar visitations by
strange men who proclaim to them the truth of the alchemical
process, demonstrate it, and then mysteriously disappear. It has
happened sufficiently often, in widely enough separated places and
times to suggest that it is not a collusive fraud nor a delusion.
Twenty years before Schweitzer’s meeting with the mysterious
stranger, Jan Baptiste van Helmont, who was responsible for several
important scientific discoveries, and was the first man to realize
that there were other gases than air; and who invented the term
“gas”, wrote:
For truly I have divers times seen it [The Philosopher’s Stone], and
handled it with my hands, but it was of colour such as is in Saffron
in its powder, yet weighty, and shining like unto powdered glass.
There was once given unto me one fourth part of one grain [16
milligrams]... I projected [it] upon eighty ounces [227 grams] of
quicksilver [mercury] made hot in a crucible; and straightaway all
the quicksilver, with a certain degree of noise, stood still from
flowing, and being congealed, settled like unto a yellow lump; but
after pouring it out, the bellows blowing, there were found eight
ounces and a little less than eleven grains of the purest gold.
Sir Isaac Newton studied alchemy until his death, remaining
convinced that the possibility of transmutation existed. The great
philosophers and mathematicians, Descartes and Leibnitz, both were
convinced that transmutation was a reality. Even Robert Boyle who
wrote a book entitled The Sceptical Chymist, was sure until the end
of his life, that transmutation was possible!
Why? These men were scientists.
The argument that their ideas or
observations were less scientific than those of the present day
simply does not stand up to scrutiny. As noted, alchemists were
rumored at various times to have gained immortality, and one of
these was Nicolas Flamel.
Flamel was a poor scribe, or scrivener and
copyist. The story goes that, in 1357 he bought an old illuminated
book...
The cover of it was of brass, well bound, all engraven with letters
of strange figures... This I know that I could not read them nor
were they either Latin of French letters... As to the matter that
was written within, it was engraved (as I suppose) with an iron
pencil or graver upon... bark leaves, and curiously coloured...
Reportedly, the first page was written in golden letters that said
Abraham the Jew, Priest, Prince, Levite, Astrologer and Philosopher,
to the Nation of the Jews dispersed by the Wrath of God in France,
wisheth Health. So, quite rightly, Flamel referred to the manuscript
as the Book of Abraham the Jew.
The dedication was followed by curses upon anyone who was not either
a priest or a Jew reading the book. But, Flamel was a scribe, which
he must have imagined exempted him from these curses, so he read the
book. The purpose of the book was avowedly to give assistance to the
dispersed Jews by teaching them to transmute lead into gold so that
they could pay their taxes to the hated Roman government. The
instructions were clear and easy, but only described the latter part
of the process. The instructions for the beginning were said to be
in the illustrations given on the 4th and 5th leaves of the book.
Flamel remarked that, although these were well executed,
...yet by that could no man ever have been able to understand it
without being well skilled in their Qabalah, which is a series of
old traditions, and also to have been well studied in their books.
As the story goes, Flamel tried for 21 years to find someone who
could explain these pictures to him. Finally, his wife urged him to
go to Spain and seek out a rabbi or other learned Jew who might
assist him. So, he made the famous pilgrimage to the shrine of St.
James at Compostela, carrying with him carefully made copies of the
book.
After his devotions at the shrine, he went to the city of Leon in
northern Spain where he met a certain “Master Canches”, a Jewish
physician. When this man saw the illustrations, he was “ravished
with great astonishment and joy”, upon recognizing them as parts of
a book that had long been believed to have been destroyed. He
declared his intention to return with Flamel to France, but he died
on the trip at Orleans. Flamel returned to Paris alone.
But,
apparently, the old Jew must have told him something for he wrote:
I had now the
prima materia, the first principles, yet not their
first preparation, which is a thing most difficult, above all things
in the world... Finally, I found that which I desired, which I also
knew by the strong scent and odor thereof. Having this, I easily
accomplished the Mastery... The fist time that I made projection
[transmutation] was upon Mercury, whereof I turned half a pound, or
thereabouts, into pure silver, better than that of the Mine, as I
myself assayed, and made others assay many times. This was upon a
Monday, the 17th of January about noon, in my home, Perrenelle [his
wife] only being present, in the year of the restoring of mankind
1382.
Several months later Flamel did his first transmutation into gold.
Is this just a story? Well, what IS true and can be verified is that
Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel endowed,
“fourteen hospitals, three
chapels and seven churches, in the city of Paris, all which we had
new built from the ground, and enriched with great gifts and
revenues, with many reparations in their churchyards. We also have
done at Boulogne about as much as we have done at Paris, not to
speak of the charitable acts which we both did to particular poor
people, principally widows and orphans.”
After Flamel’s death in 1419 the rumors began. Hoping that they
could find something hidden in one of his houses, people searched
them again and again until one of them was completely destroyed.
There were stories that Nicolas and Perenelle were still alive.
Supposedly, she had gone to Switzerland and he buried a log in her
grave, and then another log was buried at his own funeral.
In the intervening centuries, the stories persist that Flamel and
Perenelle defeated death.
The 17th century traveller, Paul Lucas,
while travelling in Asia Minor, met a Turkish philosopher who told
him that,
“true philosophers had had the secret of prolonging life
for anything up to a thousand years...”.
Lucas said, “At last I took
the liberty of naming the celebrated Flamel, who, it was said,
possessed the Philosopher’s Stone, yet was certainly dead. He smiled
at my simplicity, and asked with an air of mirth: Do you really
believe this? No, no, my friend, Flamel is still living; neither he
nor his wife has yet tasted death. It is not above three years since
I left both... in India; he is one of my best friends.”
In 1761, Flamel and his wife were reported to have been seen attending the
opera in Paris.
Well, there is an issue here regarding the supposed clue about
“Abraham the Jew” which seems to point us in the direction of a
Jewish fraternity of alchemists or keepers of secrets. I don’t want
to go off on that thread here and now because it would add so much
complexity to the issues that we might never find our way through
the maze. But, to ease the mind of the reader, I will make a few
remarks about this here.
Even though we have not yet come to the
mystery of Fulcanelli, supposedly a 20th century alchemist who
accomplished the great work, let me mention while the subject is at
hand that Eugene Canseliet, in his preface to the Second Edition of
Fulcanelli’s
Le Mystere des Cathedrales, apparently upon the
instruction of the master alchemist, emphasized dramatically the
difference between kabbala and Cabala saying:
...this book has restored to light the phonetic cabala, whose
principles and application had been completely lost. After this
detailed and precise elucidation and after the brief treatment of
it, which I gave in connection with the centaur, the man-horse of
Plessis-Bourre, in Deux Logis Alchimiques, this mother tongue need
never be confused with the Jewish Kabbala. Though never spoken, the
phonetic cabala, this forceful idiom, is easily understood and it is
the instinct or voice of nature.
By contrast, the Jewish Kabbala is full of transpositions,
inversions, substitutions and calculations, as arbitrary as they are
abstruse. This is why it is important to distinguish between the two
words, CABALA and KABBALA in order to use them knowledgeably. Cabala
derives from cadallhz or from the Latin caballus, a horse;
kabbala
is from the Hebrew Kabbalah, which means tradition. Finally,
figurative meanings like coterie, underhand dealing or intrigue,
developed in modern usage by analogy, should be ignored so as to
reserve for the noun cabala the only significance which can be
assured for it.25
Now, the curious bringing in of the terms “coterie”, “underhand
dealing” and “intrigue” in conjunction with what he has just
remarked about Kabbalah meaning “tradition”, and Cabala being
“horse”, is a most curious juxtaposition of words. It almost seems
that Canseliet is telling us that the Kaballah, or the tradition is
a red herring.
Fulcanelli himself makes a curious remark in
Dwellings of the Philosophers:
Alchemy is obscure, only because it is hidden. The philosophers who
wanted to transmit the exposition of their doctrine and the fruit of
their labors to posterity took great care not to divulge the art by
presenting it under a common form, so that the layman could not
misuse it.26
25 Fulcanelli, The Mystery of the Cathedrals, 1984, Brotherhood of
Life, Las Vegas.
26 Fulcanelli, The Dwellings of the Philosophers, 1999, Archive
Press, Boulder.
The point of this short aside is this: don’t assume anything about
Jews, Masons, or any other group when trying to solve the mystery.
Nearly everything we come across will be obscured. And, when it is
right out in plain view, it will be even more difficult to see!
Getting back to our purported alchemists, we come now to the year
1745 in which Prince Charles Edward Stuart, known as the “Young
Pretender”, staged his Jacobite rebellion in an attempt to regain
the British throne for his father the “Old Pretender”. The Jacobite
cause, for all intents and purposes, had been crushed at the battle
of Culloden in April of that year, yet there was a constant fear by
the British government that the Jacobites were still plotting with
their French sympathizers, and being French and in London was, at
that time, a liability.
This “spy fever” resulted in the arrest of
many Frenchmen on trumped up charges, and most of them were later
released, but it was a dangerous time for Gallic visitors!
In November of that year, one Frenchman was arrested and accused of
having pro-Jacobite letters in his possession. He became very
indignant and claimed that the correspondence had been “planted” on
him. Considering the mood of the time, it is quite surprising that
he was believed and released!
Horace Walpole, English author and
Member of Parliament, wrote a letter about this incident to Sir
Horace Mann on December 9, 1745 saying:
“The other day they seized an odd man who goes by the name of Count
Saint-Germain. He has been here these two years, and will not tell
who he is or whence, but professes that he does not go by his right
name. He sings and plays on the violin wonderfully, is mad and not
very sensible.”
This is one of the few “authentic” on the scene comments about one
of the most mysterious characters of the 18th century, the Count
Saint-Germain. Another acquaintance of the Count Saint-Germain,
Count Warnstedt, described Saint-Germain as, “The completest
charlatan, fool, rattle-pate, windbag and swindler”. Yet, his last
patron said that Saint-Germain was, “perhaps one of the greatest
sages who ever lived”.
Clearly this was one of those people you
either love or hate!
Saint-Germain first comes to our attention in the fashionable
circles of Vienna in about 1740, where he made a stir by wearing
black all the time! Everybody else was into bright colors, satins
and laces, ornate patterns and designs; and along comes
Saint-Germain with his somber black outfits set off by glittering
diamonds on his fingers, shoe buckles, and snuff box! What an
attention getter! If you want to stand out in a roomful of robins,
cardinals and bluejays, just be a blackbird! He also had the habit
of carrying handfuls of loose diamonds in his pockets instead of
cash!
So, there he is, garnering attention to himself in this bizarre way,
and naturally he makes the acquaintance of the local leaders of
fashion, Counts Zabor and Lobkowitz, who introduce him to the French
Marshal de Belle Isle. Well, it seems that the Marshal was seriously
under-the-weather, but his illness is not recorded so we can’t
evaluate the claims that Saint-Germain cured him. Nevertheless, the
Marshal was so grateful that he took Saint-Germain to Paris with him
and set him up with apartments and a laboratory.
The details of the Count’s life in Paris are pretty well known, and
it is there that the rumors began. There is an account by a
“Countess de B___” (a nom de plume, it seems, so we have to hold the
information somewhat suspect), who wrote in her memoirs, Chroniques
de l’oeil de boeuf, that, when she met the Count at a soiree given
by the aged Countess von Georgy, whose late husband had been
Ambassador to Venice in the 1670’s, that the old Countess remembered
Saint-Germain from those former times. So, the old girl asked the
Count if his father had been there at the time. He replied no, but
HE had!
Well, the man that Countess von Georgy had known was at least 45
years old then, at least 50 years previously, and the man standing
before her could not be any older than 45 now!
The Count smiled and
said:
“I am very old”.
“But then you must be nearly 100 years old”, the Countess exclaimed.
“That is not impossible”, the Count replied. He then related some
details that convinced the old lady that it was really him she had
met in Venice.
The Countess exclaimed: “I am already convinced. You are a most
extraordinary man, a devil!”
“For pity’s sake!”, cried Saint-Germain in a loud voice heard all
around the room. “No such names!” He began to tremble all over and
left the room immediately.
A pretty dramatic introduction to society, don’t you think? But, was
it real, or the ploy of a very clever con artist? Did he
deliberately choose to adopt the name of someone long dead, about
whom he may have already known a great deal, and then did he set out
to deceive and con in a manner well known to us in the present time
as the modus operandi of the psychopath? Was he a snake oil salesman
or a true man of mystery?
In any event, that was the beginning of the “legend”, and many more
stories of a similar nature spread through society like wildfire.
Saint-Germain apparently fed the fires with hints that he had known
the “Holy Family” intimately and had been invited to the marriage
feast at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, and dropped
casually the remark that he “had always known that Christ would meet
a bad end”.
According to him, he had been very fond of Anne, the
mother of the Virgin Mary, and had even proposed her canonization at
the Council of Nicaea in
A.D. 325! What a guy! A line for every occasion!
Pretty soon the Count had Louis XV and his mistress, Madame de
Pompadour, eating out of his hand, and it certainly could be true
that he was a French spy in England when he was arrested there,
because he later did handle some sticky business for the credulous
king of France.
In 1760, Louis sent Saint-Germain to the Hague as his personal
representative to arrange a loan with Austria that was supposed to
help finance the SevenYears’ war against England. But, while in
Holland, the Count had a falling out with his friend Casanova, who
was also a diplomat at the Hague. Casanova tried hard to discredit
Saint-Germain in public, but without success. One has to wonder just
what it was that Casanova discovered or came to think about
Saint-Germain at this time.
In any even, Saint-Germain was making other enemies. One of these
enemies was the Duc de Choiseul, King Louis’ Foreign Minister. The
Duc discovered that Saint-Germain had been scoping out the
possibilities of arranging a peace between England and France. Now,
that doesn’t sound like a bad plan at all, but the Duc managed to
convince the King that this was a dire betrayal, and the Count had
to flee to England and then back to Holland.
In Holland, the Count lived under the name Count Surmont, and he
worked to raise money to set up laboratories in which he made paint
and dyes and engaged in his alchemical experiments. By all accounts,
he was successful in some sense, because he disappeared from Holland
with 100,000 guilders!
He next shows up in Belgium as the “Marquis de Monferrat”. He set up
another laboratory with “other people’s money” before disappearing
again. (Are we beginning to see a pattern here?)
For a number of years, Saint-Germain’s activities continued to be
reported from various parts of Europe and, in 1768 he popped up in
the court of Catherine the Great. Turkey had just declared war on
Russia, and Saint-Germain promoted himself as a valuable diplomat
because of his status as an “insider” in French politics. Pretty
soon he was the adviser of Count Alexei Orlov, head of the Russian
Imperial Forces.
Orlov made him a high-ranking officer of the
Russian Army and Saint-Germain acquired an English alias, “General
Welldone”.
His successes in Russia could have enabled him to retire on his
laurels, but he didn’t. In 1774 he appeared in Nuremberg seeking
money from the Margrave of Brandenburg, Charles Alexander. His
ostensible alias at this point (apparently he was no longer
satisfied with being either a Count or a Marquis) was Prince Rakoczy
of Transylvania!
Naturally, the Margrave of Brandenburg was impressed when Count
Orlov visited Nuremburg on a state visit and embraced “the Prince”
warmly. But later, when the Margrave did a little investigating, he
discovered that the real Prince Rakoczy was indubitably dead and
that this counterfeit Prince was, in fact, only Count Saint-Germain!
Saint-Germain did not deny the charges, but apparently he felt that
it was now time to move on.
The Duc de Choiseul, Saint-Germain’s old enemy, had claimed that the
Count was in the employ of Frederick the Great. But, that was
probably not true because, at this point, Saint-Germain wrote to
Frederick begging for patronage. Frederick ignored him, which is
peculiar if he had been in the employ of the Prussian king as de
Choiseul thought.
In the way of the psychopathic con man who can never quite figure
out when to quit, Saint-Germain went to Leipzig and presented
himself to Prince Frederick Augustus of Brunswick as a Freemason of
the fourth grade!
Now, Frederick Augustus just happened to be the Grand Master of the
Prussian Masonic Lodges, so this was really a stupid move on the
part of Saint-Germain since it turned out that he was not a Mason!
But, it is true of the pattern of all con men; their egos eventually
prove to be their downfall! The Prince challenged Saint-Germain
because he did not know the secret signals and sent him away as a
fraud.
In 1779, Saint-Germain was an old man in his 60’s who continued to
claim to be vastly older. He hadn’t lost his touch because, at
Eckenforde in Schleswig, Germany, he was able to charm Prince
Charles of Hesse-Cassel.
At this point, part of his scam included
being a mystic, for he is recorded as having told Prince Charles:
“Be the torch of the world. If your light is that only of a planet,
you will be as nothing in the sight of God. I reserve for you a
splendour, of which the solar glory
is a shadow. You shall guide the course of the stars, and those who
rule Empires shall be guided by you.”
Sounds rather like the build-up to another con job! Nothing like
feeding the ego of the “mark” before slipping away with all his
money! However, Saint Germain was on the way to a place where money
was of no use. On February 27, 1784, he died at Prince Charles’ home
on Eckenforde.
He was buried locally and the Prince erected a stone
that said:
He who called himself the Comte de Saint-Germain and Welldone, of
whom there is no other information, has been buried in this church.
And then the Prince burned all of the Count’s papers “lest they be
misinterpreted”. The only reason we can conceive of for that is
because the Prince wanted to continue to believe in the powers of
Saint Germain, and the papers of the Count did not support that
belief.
Supposedly there is evidence that the Count did not die, and many
occultists claim he is still alive for these past two centuries!
Based upon his pattern of behavior, however, Count Saint Germain
seems merely to have been your garden variety psychopath. He may
have had certain esoteric knowledge - he was certainly well-versed in
many subjects - but his history, and the conflicting stories told
about him give us a different perspective, particularly when we
examine the histories and personalities of those who believed in him
as opposed to those who did not. You can tell a lot about a man by
his friends and his enemies.
The mystery of Saint-Germain is mostly due to the uncertainty
surrounding his origins. One source says that he was born in 1710 in
San Germano, son of a tax collector. Eliphas Levi, the 19th century
occultist said that Saint-Germain was born in Lentmeritz in Bohemia,
and was the bastard son of a nobleman who was also a Rosicrucian.
Levi’s story and accomplishments suggest that he was another
psychopath, so his word on the matter is useless.
It is known that Saint Germain had a genuine gift for languages and
could speak French, German, English, Dutch and Russian fluently. He
also claimed that he was fluent in Chinese, Hindu and Persian, but
there was no one about to test him on those. And, we note that
Horace Walpole said that he was a wonderful violinist and singer and
painter, though none of his purported art has been known to survive.
Supposedly, he was able to paint jewels that glittered in a very
lifelike way.
There is also a great deal of evidence that Saint-Germain was an
expert jeweller - he claimed to have studied the art with the Shah of
Persia! In any event, he is reported to have repaired a flawed
diamond for Louis XV, who was very pleased with the result.
Saint-Germain also had an extensive knowledge of chemistry in all
its branches at the time, and the many laboratories that he set up
with borrowed money were all designed to produce brighter and better
pigments and dyes and also for alchemical studies. Then, there was
his reputation as a healer.
Not only did he cure the Marshal de
Belle Isle, he also cured a friend of Madame de Pompadour of
mushroom poisoning. Saint-Germain never ate in company, which was
obviously part of his plan to focus attention on himself. He could
sit at a table where everyone else was gorging on the most amazing
array of delectable dishes, and eat and drink nothing. Casanova
wrote:
Instead of eating, he talked from the beginning of the meal to the
end, and I followed his example in one respect as I did not eat, but
listened to him with the greatest attention. It may safely be said
that as a conversationalist he was unequalled.
We note that this is another of the many talents attributed to
psychopaths. Colin Wilson, author of The Occult, thought that
Saint-Germain must have been a vegetarian. I think everything he did
was designed to create an image, an impression, and a false one at
that. In the end, the real mystery, aside from his origins, but the
two may be connected, is where did Saint-Germain get all his
specialized knowledge?
Of course, as we have noted here, not all who
met Saint-Germain were impressed by his talents. Casanova was
entertained by him, but nevertheless thought that he was a fraud and
a charlatan.
He wrote:
"This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of
impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he
was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of the
Universal Medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he
could melt diamonds, professing himself capable of forming, out of
10 or 12 small diamonds, one of the finest water... All this, he
said, was a mere trifle to him. Notwithstanding his boastings, his
bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I
found him offensive. In spite of my knowledge of what he was and in
spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man...”
Count Alvensleben, a Prussian Ambassador to the Court at Dresden,
wrote in
1777:
He is a highly gifted man with a very alert mind, but
completely without judgment, and he has only gained his singular
reputation by the lowest and basest
flattery of which a man is capable, as well as by his outstanding
eloquence, especially if one lets oneself be carried away by the
fervor and the enthusiasm with which he can express himself.
Inordinate vanity is the mainspring driving his whole mechanism.
I don’t know about you, but I have met a few people with all of the
above qualities and have even been deceived by one or two for a
short while. Everything we discover about Saint Germain tends to the
theory of the brilliant psychopath. It sounds like an easy thing to
dismiss Saint Germain out of hand. But, in the case of the Count, we
have a little problem: just which of the stories are really about
him? The plot thickens!
It seems that Berthold Volz, in the 1920’s, did some deep research
on the subject and discovered, or so it is claimed, (I have never
been able to track down this purported proof), that the Duc de
Choiseul, who was overwhelmingly jealous of the Count, hired a
look-alike imposter to go about as the Count, exaggerating and
playing the fool in order to place the Count in a bad light. Is this
just another story, either wishful thinking or deliberately designed
to perpetuate the legend? Are we getting familiar with this “bait
and switch” routine yet?
Supposedly, Saint-Germain foretold the outbreak of the French
Revolution to Marie Antoinette who purportedly wrote in her diary
that she regretted that she did not heed his advice. I haven’t seen
it, so I can’t vouch for it. But, in my opinion, it wouldn’t take a
genius to predict that event, considering the social and political
climate of the time!
It was said that Saint-Germain appeared in Wilhelmsbad in 1785, a
year after he was supposed to have died, and he was accompanied by
the magician Cagliostro, the hypnotist Anton Mesmer, and the
“unknown philosopher”, Louis Claude de St. Martin. But that is
hearsay also.
Next he was alleged to have gone to Sweden in 1789 to warn King
Gustavus III of danger. After that, he visited his friend, diarist
Mademoiselle d’Adhemar, who said he still looked like he was only 46
years old! Apparently, he told her that she would see him five more
times, and she claimed this was, in fact, the case. Supposedly the
last visit was the night before the murder of the Duc de Berri in
1820. Again, we find this to be unsupported by evidence.
Napoleon III ordered a commission to investigate the life and
activities of Saint-Germain, but the findings were destroyed in a
fire at the Hotel de Ville in Paris in 1871 - which many people think
is beyond coincidence. My thought would be that the only reason to
destroy such a report would be if it had proved the Count to be a
fraud.
The result of this fire is that the legend is enabled to live
on; it is likely that the report would have made some difference in
the legend, such as putting it to rest as a fraud. Had it been
helpful to the legend, it would not have changed what is already the
case, which is that people believe that Saint-Germain was something
of a supernatural being. Thus, its destruction, if engineered, must
only have been to protect the status quo.
One of the next threads of the legend was gathered into the hands of
Helena Blavatsky who claimed that Saint-Germain was one of the
“hidden masters” along with Christ, Buddha, Appollonius of Tyana,
Christian Rosencreutz, Francis Bacon and others. In my opinion, Blavatsky’s credibility becomes highly questionable by merely making
this claim. A group of Theosophists traveled to Paris after WW II
where they were told they would meet the Count; he never showed up.
In 1972, a Frenchman named Richard Chanfray was interviewed on
French television. He claimed to be Saint-Germain and, supposedly,
in front of television cameras, transmuted lead into gold on a camp
stove! And, lest we forget the more recent “communications” of the
count to the head of the Church Universal and Triumphant, Elizabeth
Clare Prophet.
In the end, on the subject of Saint-Germain, we find lies and
confusion. Get used to it. And, if Saint-Germain was a fraud we have
to think somewhat carefully about those who claim him as their
“connection” to things esoteric!
During the 19th and 20th centuries, alchemy lost favor with the rise
of experimental science. The time was that of such stellar names as
Lavoisier, Priestley and Davy. Dalton’s atomic theory and a host of
discoveries in chemistry and physics made it clear to all
“legitimate” scientists that alchemy was only a “mystical” and, at
best, harmless pastime of no scientific value.
Organizations such as the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis
devised corrupted mixtures of snippets of alchemy and oriental
philosophy, stirred in with the western European magical traditions,
but these were clearly distorted imitations composed mostly of
wishful thinking, romantic nonsense, and monstrous egos. When one
deeply studies the so-called “adepts” of these “systems”, one is
confronted again and again with the archetype of the “failed
magician” so that one can only shake the head and remember the
warning of the great alchemists, that those who do not develop
within themselves the “special state” that is required for the
“Great Work”, can only bring disaster .
There is no doubt in my mind
that such groups dabble in “alchemy” of a sort, or “magick” of
another, and there is no doubt that they may, in fact, “conjure”
connections to sources of “power” on occasion. But, overall, a
survey of what can be learned about them tends to point in the
direction of much wishful thinking or even the possibility of
domination by the forces of entropy in the guise of “angels of
light”.
In 1919, British physicist Ernest Rutherford announced that he had
achieved a successful transmutation of one element into another:
nitrogen to oxygen! Admittedly, his procedures and results in no way
resembled the work of the alchemists; but, what he had done was
refute the insistence of most scientists of the day that
transmutation was impossible.
In fact, it soon became known that
radioactive elements gradually “decay”, giving off radiation and
producing “daughter elements” which then decay even further. For
instance one such chain starts with uranium and the end product is
lead. So, the question became, can the process be reversed? Or, if
you start with another element, what might you end up with?
Franz Tausend was a 36 year-old chemical worker in Munich who had a
theory about the structure of the elements that was a strange
mixture of Pythagoreanism and modern chemistry. He published a
pamphlet entitled, “180 elements, their atomic weight, and their
incorporation in a system of harmonic periods”. He thought that
every atom had a frequency of vibration characteristic of that
element, related to the weight of the atom’s nucleus and the
grouping of the electrons around it. This part of his idea was shown
to be basically correct by later research.
However, Tausend further
suggested that matter could be “orchestrated” by adding the right
substance to the element, thereby changing its vibration frequency,
in which case, it would become a different element.
As it happened, at about the same time, Adolf Hitler was sent to
prison for attempting to organize an armed uprising. One of his
cohorts was General Erich Ludendorff, but Ludendorff was acquitted
of the charges and ran for president of Germany the following year.
He was defeated by Hindenburg, so he turned his mind to raising
money for the nascent Nazi party. He heard rumors that a certain
Tausend had transmuted base metals into gold, and he formed a group,
including numerous industrialists, to investigate this process.
Tausend gave instructions that they should purchase iron oxide and
quartz which were melted together in a crucible. A German merchant
and member of this group, named Stremmel, took the crucible to his
hotel bedroom for the night so that it could not be tampered with.
The next morning, Tausend heated the crucible in his electric
furnace in the presence of his patrons, and then added a small
quantity of white powder to the molten mass. It was allowed to cool,
and then, when it was broken open, a gold nugget weighing 7 grams
was inside.
Ludendorff, to say the least, was ecstatic. He set about forming a
company called “Company 164”. Investment money poured in and within
a year the general had diverted some 400,000 marks into Nazi Party
funds. Then, in December, 1926, he resigned, leaving Tausend to
handle all the debts. Tausend managed to continue raising money and
on June 16, 1928, supposedly made 25 ounces of gold in a single
operation. This enabled him to issue a series of “share
certificates” worth 22 pounds each (10 kilograms of gold).
A year later, when no more gold had been produced, Tausend was
arrested for fraud, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to four years
in prison. Nevertheless, while waiting for trial, he was able to
perform a transmutation under strict supervision, in the Munich
Mint. This was submitted to the court as evidence that no fraud had
taken place, but it was contested and did not save him from prison.
In the same year that Tausend was convicted, a Polish engineer named
Dunikovski announced in Paris that he had discovered a new kind of
radiation which would transmute quartz into gold. The mineral,
spread on copper plates, was melted by an electric discharge at
110,000 volts, and was then irradiated with these new “z-rays”.
Investors poured two million francs into Dunikovski’s project, but,
within a few months, when no gold appeared, he was also tried and
found guilty of fraud. After two years in prison, Dunikovski’s
lawyer obtained an early release, and he went with his family to
Italy where he again began to experiment. Rumors soon started that
he was supporting himself by the occasional sale of lumps of gold.
His lawyer, accompanied by the eminent chemist, Albert Bonn, went to
see him.
What was discovered was that the quartz being used by Dunikovski
(and presumably by Tausend as well) already contained minute
quantities of gold. The gold could be extracted by a usual process,
producing about 10 parts per million, but Dunikovski’s technique
produced almost 100 times as much. Nevertheless, he was only dealing
with small quantities of gold because his equipment could only
handle small quantities of quartz.
Dunikovski claimed that his process accelerated the natural growth
of “embryonic” gold within the quartz. He gave a demonstration
before an invited group of scientists that attracted considerable
attention. An Anglo-French syndicate formed to bring sand from
Africa and treat it in a big new laboratory on the south coast of
England, but WW II started at about this time and Dunikovski
disappeared. It was rumored that he was “co-opted” by the Germans
and manufactured gold for them to bolster their failing economy - but
there is no proof.
Since WW II, there have been and still are, many practitioners of
alchemy. Much of this activity has been centered in France,
including Eugene Canseliet, who claimed to have been a pupil of the
mysterious Fulcanelli mentioned above.
In studying alchemy and the history of alchemy and all related books
I could find, I came finally to Fulcanelli and the mention of him in
the book
Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and
Bergier.
Bergier claimed that in June of 1937 - eight years before the first
atom-bomb test in New Mexico - that he was approached by an
impressive but mysterious stranger. The man asked Bergier to pass on
a message to the noted physicist Andre Helbronner, for whom Bergier
was then working. The man said that he felt it was his duty to warn
orthodox scientists of the danger of nuclear energy. He said that
the alchemists of bygone times - and previous civilizations - had
obtained such secret knowledge and it had destroyed them.
The
mysterious stranger said that he really had no hope that his warning
would be heeded, but felt that he ought to give it anyway. Jacques Bergier remained convinced until the day he died that the stranger
was Fulcanelli. As the story goes, the American Office for Strategic
Services, the forerunner of the CIA, made an intensive search for Fulcanelli at the end of the war.
He was never found.
The argument against this strange event ever having happened is that
plutonium was specifically named by the mystery man, yet it was not
isolated until February of 1941, and was not named until March of
1942. This was five years after Bergier’s encounter. Nevertheless,
Bergier stood by his story. 27
27 It has been noted by the student of Fulcanelli’s only disciple,
Eugene Canseliet, Patrick Riviere, that Bergier - just before he died - claimed that Schwaller and Fulcanelli were one and the same
individual.
Andre VandenBroeck’s AL-KEMI, A MEMOIR: Hermetic, Occult, Political
and Private Aspects of
R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1987 Inner Traditions/Lindisfarn Press)
claims a clandestine collaboration between Fulcanelli and Rene
Schwaller.
Supposedly, Schwaller confided to VandenBroeck that
Fulcanelli stole from him an original manuscript on the alchemical
symbolism of the Gothic Cathedrals and published it under his own
name as Mystery of the Cathedrals. VandenBroeck’s allegation seems
to be supported only by VandenBroeck himself, and simply does not
fit the facts or the timeline.
In her work Fulcanelli Dévoilé (1992 Dervy) Geneviève Dubois
suggests that Schwaller believed Jean-Julien Champagne to be
Fulcanelli and that it was Champagne who took the manuscript.
Champagne was quite a practical joker and was happy to let others
think he was Fulcanelli.
And, the fact is, if we are talking
about Master Alchemists, the history seems to indicate that they
have “time travel” capabilities to some extent. So, the matter of
knowing the name of the element would not have been too great a
difficulty.
In the early 1920’s, in Paris, there was a small man in his early
twenties, named Eugene Canseliet who was known as an alchemical
enthusiast. He made many references to the fact that he worked with
an actual “Master of the Art”. His friend and companion, a poverty
stricken illustrator named Jean-Julien Champagne, who was a score of
years older than Canseliet, supported these claims.
The two of them
lived in a run-down building, in adjacent apartments, at 59 bis, rue
de Rochechouart, in the Butte-Montmartre district. Because of their
hints that they had contact with such a “Hidden Master”, they soon
became the center of a circle of aspiring occultists who became
known as the Brothers of Heliopolis. It seems that both Canseliet
and Champagne were frequently seen in the city libraries, the
Bibliotheque Nationale, the Mazarin, the Arsenal and the Sainte
Genevieve, studying rare books and manuscripts. Obviously, they were
looking for something.
The story heard by those on the edges of this elite little group was
to the effect that this “Hidden Master Fulcanelli” was old,
distinguished - possibly an aristocrat - and very rich. He was also
said to be an immensely learned, practicing alchemist who had either
already, or almost, achieved the Great Work.
Nobody (until later, as we saw with Jacques Bergier) except
Canseliet and Champagne ever claimed to have met Master Fulcanelli,
and, because of this, a great deal of skepticism arose in the occult
circles of Paris. But then, the skepticism was laid to rest with the
publication of Le mystere des cathedrales in 1926. This first
edition consisted of only 300 copies, and was published by Jean
Schemit of 45 rue Lafitte, in the Opera district.
It was subtitled,
“An esoteric interpretation of the hermetic symbols of the Great Work”, and its preface was
written by Eugene Canseliet, then aged only 26. The book had 36
illustrations, two of them in color, by the artist, Champagne. So,
in one fell swoop, both Canseliet and Champagne were vindicated, and
their place among the coterie of occultists assured!
The subject of the book was a purported interpretation of the
symbolism of various Gothic cathedrals and other buildings in Europe
as being encoded instructions of alchemical secrets. This idea, that
the secrets were contained in the stone structures, carvings, and so
forth, of the medieval buildings had been hinted at by other writers
on esoteric art and architecture, but no one had ever explicated the
subject so clearly and in such detail before. In any event,
Fulcanelli’s book caused a sensation among the Parisian occultists.
In the preface, written by Canseliet, there is the hint that Master
Fulcanelli had “attained the Stone” - that is, had become mystically
transfigured and illuminated and had disappeared!
He disappeared when the fatal hour struck, when the Sign was
accomplished... Fulcanelli is no more. But we have at least this
consolation that his thought remains, warm and vital, enshrined for
ever in these pages.28
28 From Canseliet’s introduction to Fulcanelli’s book.
The extraordinary scholarship of Les Mystere drove the occult crowd
of Paris mad with desire to know who Fulcanelli really was! Rumor
and speculation ran wild!
About these speculations regarding Fulcanelli’s possible identity,
Kenneth Rayner Johnson writes:
There were suggestions that he was a surviving member of the former
French royal family, the Valois. Although they were supposed to have
died out in 1589 upon the demise of Henri III, it was known that
members of the family had dabbled in magic and mysticism and that
Marguerite de France, daughter of Henri II and wife of Henri IV of
Navarre, survived until 1615. What is more, one of her many lovers
was the esoterically inclined Francis Bacon (whom many still claim
as an adept to this day); she was divorced in 1599 and her personal
crest bore the magical pentagram, each of whose five points carried
one letter of the Latin word salus meaning ‘health.’ Could the
reputedly aristocratic Fulcanelli be a descendant of the Valois, and
did the Latin motto hint that some important alchemical secret of
longevity had been passed on to him by the family?
Some claimed Fulcanelli was a bookseller-occultist,
Pierre Dujols,
who with his wife ran a shop in the rue de Rennes in the Luxembourg
district of Paris. But Dujols was already known to have been only a
speculative alchemist, writing under the nom de plume of Magophon.
Why should he hide behind two aliases? Another suggestion was that
Fulcanelli was the writer J. H. Rosny the elder. Yet his life was
too well-known to the public for this theory to find acceptance.
There were also at least three practical alchemists working in the
city around the same period. They operated under the respective
pseudonyms of Auriger,
Faugerons and Dr. Jaubert. The argument against them being
Fulcanelli was much the same as that against Dujols-Magophon: why
use more than one alias?
Finally, there were Eugene Canseliet and Jean-Julien Champagne, both
of whom were directly connected with Fulcanelli’s book, and both of
whom had claimed to have known the Master personally.29
29 Johnson, Kenneth R., The Fulcanelli Phenomenon,1992. These
stories have since been laid to rest as everything from idle
speculation to overt disinfo with the publication in French of
Fulcanelli by Patrick Rivière in 2000. An updated and revised second
edition, with much new material, appeared in 2004, published by
Pardès in their series “Qui suis-je?” An English translation of Mr.
Rivière’s book will soon appear and should settle once and for all
the questions of Fulcanelli’s identity.
There was one major objection to Canseliet being Fulcanelli: he was
too young to possibly have gained the knowledge apparent in the
book. And, yes, a study of his preface as compared with the text
demonstrated distinctly different styles. So, Canseliet was
excluded.
Champagne is the next likely suspect because he was older and more
experienced, and it was a certainty that his work as an artist had
taken him around France so that he would have had opportunity to
view all the monuments described in such detail. The only problem
with this theory was that Champagne was a “noted braggart, practical
joker, punster and drunkard, who frequently liked to pass himself
off as Fulcanelli - although his behavior was entirely out of
keeping with the traditional solemn oath of the adept to remain
anonymous and let his written work speak for itself”.
And, in
addition to that, Champagne was an alcoholic whose imbibing of
absinthe and Pernod eventually killed him. He died in 1932 of
gangrene at the age of 55. His toes actually fell off. Doesn’t sound
much like a “Master Alchemist”. As a humorous note, some of the
descriptions of the transmutation of the alchemist make you wonder
if the toes falling off isn’t part of the process!
Joking aside, there are many more details and curiousities involved
in the sorting out of who or what Fulcanelli may have really been,
with no more resolution than we had at the beginning of the
discussion! It just goes around in circles! The bottom line is: more
than one person has attested to Fulcanelli’s existence, his success
in transmutation and to his continued existence into the present
time which would make him over 140 years old! And some theorists
think he may be older than that!
The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and
Jacques Bergier,
was published in 1963, and it was only then that English speaking
occultists and students of alchemy became aware of Fulcanelli. At
that point in time, it was to be another eight years before |