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Fulcanelli: The Mystery, the Secret and The ManArticle by Vincent Bridges, 1999 www.vincentbridges.comIn his masterwork, The Mystery of the Cathedrals, the anonymous author Fulcanelli poses a riddle:How does a Tree become a Stone, which then becomes a Star?Of course, being Fulcanelli, he shies away from such blunt simplicity. It was far too much too sayopenly that the secret of alchemy, and of science in its broadest sense, consisted of a Tree forming aStone and igniting into a Star. Never mind solving the riddle of how it’s done.And yet, the careful reader will discern this very enigma at the core of Fulcanelli’s book. Why?Because the truth is simple. The secret of alchemy is contained in the riddle of how a tree — theTree of Life, the World Pillar, the Djed — transforms into the Precious Stone of the Wise. And then,the core of the mystery, how that Stone becomes a star, an imperishable light body or perhaps eventhe body of a star in Orion. However, even though the truth is simple, the secret has a way of  protecting itself.Take Le Mysterie for example. Much has been written about just who “Fulcanelli” might have been,
 
 but very little, outside of Canseliet, has been written about what Fulcanelli said. Eugene Canseliet,Fulcanelli’s pupil, took the approach in his works of expanding on Fulcanelli’s alchemicalmetaphors without venturing a concrete explanation of the process itself. By his own admission, henever succeeded in what he imagined the ultimate goal to be, the transmutation of lead into gold.Therefore, we might be justified to suspect Canseliet’s level of understanding.But what did Fulcanelli say? Does he actually reveal the secret of alchemy’s riddle?Understanding Fulcanelli’s masterpiece requires preparation, guidance and more than a little patience. Le Mystere is not literature in the normal sense. It’s an initiation document designed toinstruct the reader in a new way of thinking in and about symbols. Fulcanelli is always honest. Henever cheats the reader or hides behind his vows of secrecy, but he does insist that the reader do thework. Otherwise the revelation is worthless. Therefore, the initiation takes the form of a puzzle, or ariddle.For preparation, one could do no better than to read carefully all of Book III and Chapter Two of Book V of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Fulcanelli assumes that any intelligent reader would be aware of this perspective and would basically agree with it. Fulcanelli, in Le Mystere, istrying to provide specific examples of Hugo’s metaphors in stone. A good guide book to Notre-Dame is also valuable, as is a general history of the Gothic period and its cathedrals.The best preparation however is to forget everything you have ever read or heard about alchemy.Let Fulcanelli explain it to you as if you had never heard the word before. In practical terms, itmeans skipping Canseliet’s prefaces and Walter Lang’s introduction. Or, at least, save them untillast.When we do this, we start where Fulcanelli started, with an experience, a gnosis, of the transcendent power of a Gothic Cathedral. He tells us that his first sight of a cathedral, at the age of seven, senthim into “an ecstasy, struck with wonder.” Today, the only way to recapture a little of “the magic of such splendor, such immensity, such intoxication expressed by this more divine than human work,”is to stand some quiet summer evening just in front of the railing at the Great Porch of Notre-Damede Paris and slowly let your vision crawl heavenward over the complex universe of symbolic forms.Bathed in the golden light of sunset, thousands of forms and concepts and images struggle towardsome unity of purpose that our modern mind finds all but incomprehensible. But to the child, or thechild-like, it has the power of revelation. book in stone Fulcanelli informs us that the images on the cathedrals speak more clearly than wordsand books. They are “simple in expression, naive and picturesque in interpretation; a sense purgedof subtleties, of allusions ,of literary ambiguities.” The Gothic, he suggests, is like Gregorian
 
chants, many voices coming together in a single note. This is important guidance for understandingthe book as a whole. Fulcanelli combines images or voices all juxtaposed on a single note or themein such a way that every voice is related to the theme as a whole. As in music, the structure thatallows this inter-relatedness is based on geometry and mathematics. It is nothing less than thehermetic Grand Theme, the Music of the Spheres, which is depicted within the Gothic cathedrals.The Grand Theme is introduced by the arrangement and subjects of the nine chapters in part one,called “Le Mystere des Cathedrals.” From its title we can supposed that it was meant to impart anoverall viewpoint from which the rest of the book, the details of the pattern, can be understood.Grouping the themes of the nine chapters as presented defines an interesting symbol: the sword inthe stone. The first three chapters compose the grip of the subject and the sword, whose basictheme, the hermetic wisdom of the Gothic cathedrals, continues through a stone of five inter-relatedsymbols within the cathedrals, and on into the foundation “stone” of Notre-Dame de Paris. Thisdevice also presents the lightning flash order of creation taught by magickal cabalists such as theHermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
(The Kabbalistic Tree Of Life)
The next three sections fill in this revealed Tree. “Paris,” the second part of Le Mystere, completesthe Tree of Life foreshadowed in the first section. This second section, reflecting the archetypalworld of the cabalists, gives us the most complete rendition of the Grand Theme of ten spheres andtwenty-two paths, including the gnostic Path of Return. “Amiens,” section three, fills in a portion of the developed Tree by giving the reader a deeper understanding of the planetary processes. The
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