Authors: Joseph P. Farrell,Scott D. de Hart
32
See again, H.S.M. Coxeter,
Regular Polytopes
, p. 153 ff.
33
To make this qualitative speculation hard and fast, one would have to have accurate dimensional measures of these structures, and all my attempts to find such measures as this book was being researched turned up nothing. If such dimensional measures are available, then an analysis of possible frequency resonances with these cavities would have to be undertaken to make this speculation quantitative and conclusive.
34
W.M. Flinders Petrie,
The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh
, p. 96.
35
I have added these words in parentheses to clarify that Petrie is still commenting about the lowest course of granite casing stones on the Second Pyramid.
36
Petrie, op. cit., p. 96.
37
For this point, see my
Babylon’s Banksters
, pp. 130-155.
38
This is true even of the two other pyramid-building cultures — Mesopotamia and China — though we have not examined them here, having already commented about them elsewhere.
14
A G
OTHIC
E
PILOGUE
:
A
LCHEMY AND THE
C
ATHEDRALS
(Joseph P Farrell and Scott D. de Hart)
“It is enough for us to know that the wonders of the Middle Ages hold the same positive truth,
the same scientific bases as the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of Greece, the Roman catacombs
and the Byzantine basilicas.… The hermeticists…will recognize here that it is from the confrontation
of the Book and the Building that the Spirit is released and the Letter dies.”
E. Canseliet
1
I
t was St. Anselm who first exposed the logic of the alchemy of perpetual debt when he raised the question,
cur deus homo
or “why the God-man?” Indeed, the medieval apologist answered his own question as to why God should leave a throne of universal authority and become the Lamb (of God) led to a slaughter. His answer: an infinite crime requires a corresponding judgment of infinite proportion; a punishment that would literally shake the foundations of the earth; an execution so horrific that the sun would take cover in the shadows of darkness. Humanity was on trial with an offended God and nothing less than a perfectly
innocent
victim of infinite worth being subjected to a false trial, bodily torture, and an agonizingly slow execution was deemed satisfactory to ameliorate the insult of disobedience and “zero balance the books.”
We have raised in these pages more than a few counter arguments to the revered Saint Anselm; respectful but not as naïve as the defenseless Boso, for there are literally pyramidal mountains of evidence that are not so haphazardly scattered across the earth and over the span of centuries if not millennia. Boso, the curious and open minded disciple may have been finally silenced by the blood- curdling logic of Anselm of Canterbury, but how differently might he have countered his master if he were given a chance to survey the ancient monuments, open the sacred Mayan texts, and to make a
comparative study of human history with its echoed tales of innocent victims bleeding to appease an offended all powerful heavenly ruler? How differently might Boso have answered his master if he had been privileged to see into the future and gaze at the alchemical symbols that would adorn the great Gothic cathedrals raised only a few hundred years later?
The logical lid to Pandora’s box has been swept off with hurricane winds of modern research. It is now impossible to reseal this once mysterious box with a simplistic theological “final word”; a word that was once sufficient to satisfy the medieval doubting Thomas’ minds. The 21
st
century winds of time, historical inquiry, and archaeological evidence unquestionably raise a voice of doubt concerning the credibility of Anselm’s apology. Perhaps even more disconcerting to modern unbelievers is the seemingly
im
moral appeal of the medieval apologist’s insistence upon a once-for-all debt and payment theology which, as has now been shown, was hardly an isolated once-for-all incident. Careful research now reveals that the debt and payment ritual espoused by Anselm was little more than his own preferred bloody event among
many
innocent blood lettings to
this
or
that
god demanding endless sacrifices. The debt and payment ritual on the outskirts of a Jerusalem hillside in or about 33 C.E was gruesome and historically significant, but it was undoubtedly neither the first nor the last one made to an offended god demanding payment of a debt.
If Anselm’s adversary in this dialogue were an atheist rather than his disciple it is certain that more poignant questions might have been asked, such as why would a
loving
god insist on the
un
loving ritual of draining the blood of victims for the appeasing of feelings that arose from an
insult
? What moral value is actually attached to the death of an innocent substitute victim? How is
insult
turned to satisfaction when the punishment seems to far outweigh the ostensible crime? Is it possible that the actual lust for recompense has less to do with insult and more to do with the payment over an assumed debt far more significant than the insult of disobedience?
Indeed, morality and innocence are hardly in play in this drama, other than in the tear filled eyes of the onlookers and next victims. This drama, for all practical concern, lacks any human morality; if any morality could be wrestled from this drama one might think they were
watching an alternative version of Oscar Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray
; the chicanery of an angry god with blood dripping from his hands, scars and wrinkled brow, clinched fists, morphing into a loving and pure young man as all the sins of the world are infused into him rather than sins committed by him. Oddly enough, Victorian England condemned Wilde as propagating immorality in verse for a novel where the protagonist turns
from
his lust for blood and dies remorsefully, driving death’s blade into the image of something evil. Aztecs and Anselm, conversely, wrote the climax to their drama with an innocent virgin dying to appease a blood thirsty god, and somehow this makes the world a better place. In the one case, it was a twisted “spiritual economics” that set the sacrificial drama into motion; in the other, a twisted physics, and both come together in some black alchemy designed to transform man’s soul into the mindset of a perpetual slave.
“The world is a stage,” stated Oscar Wilde, “but the play is badly cast.” The stage for this tragedy is no quiet hillside nor a Victorian neo-gothic mansion with a magical portrait inside a nursery, but rather it is a far more sinister and unsuspecting place. This tragedy is one of debts, pure and simple. Gods with a thirst for more than moral uprightness; gods with an unquenchable need to eliminate competition; gods demanding nothing less than control over property and establishing ownership by threat and force. A quid pro quo played out from start to finish, a chilling tale of servitude and sacrifice for satisfying a debt, and manipulating the physical medium. This is the story of
The Grids of the Gods
, it is the story of human history and some of the monuments left behind on that grid as memorials!
The Grid did not die; the magical and alchemical music of the spheres, and the possible hyper-dimensional engineering with which it was engineered, did not die. It survived in the unlikely place of western Europe, in the breathtaking Gothic cathedrals, and the ambiguous, but clearly alchemical natures of the symbolism sculpted in them. No one better understood the ambivalent nature of these symbols than the enigmatic “Fulcanelli,” a man as ambiguous, ambivalent, and alchemical as the symbols of the cathedrals whose esoteric and alchemical meanings he dared to expose. Lest we
become lost in the mystery of the man,
2
however, we remain concentrated upon his work, or rather, upon just one of the many symbols he decodes.
We have seen that there was alchemy at work in this attempt to manipulate the physical medium through a “spiritual economics” of debt and sacrifice. But the practice of sacrifice, alchemy, and “spiritual debt” did not die with the Aztecs and Montezuma, for one need go no further as an epilogue to this survey of the Grid than these great Gothic cathedrals, where yet another ritual of sacrifice was played out amid the backdrop of a scarcely perceived alchemical symbolism. Those great, soaring, buttressed cathedrals are, as many know, purposefully laid out on points of the Gird; what many do not know, however, are the calculated depths of ambivalent alchemical symbolism that is employed within and through them.
We mention only one of the many bas reliefs of
Notre Dame de Paris
, pointed out by Fulcanelli in his monumental study. In many ways, it is the key to his work, as it is also the key to the alchemy of the cathedrals, and the deeper symbolisms that would eventually come bursting forth in European literature and art once the necessity for disguising them behind a veneer of Christianity was no longer necessary, and independent thought had begun to liberate itself to examine these symbols with more objectivity.
Fulcanelli was alchemy’s answer to Anselm.
Or rather, he was the decoder of alchemy’s symbolism which adorned the gothic cathedrals of France.
Consider the ambiguous nature of the following bas relief found in
Notre Dame de Paris
, the first such relief and symbolism Fulcanelli discussed in his book.
The Ambiguous Bas Relief At Notre Dame de Paris: King of Heaven? or Androgynous Alchemy?
3
The relief is found on the Great Porch of the famous Paris cathedral.
At first glance, the dictates of Christian piety will perhaps decode the relief in a predictable way: a figure is seated on a throne, holding a scepter in the left hand, and two books — one open, and the other closed — in the right, with the curious figure of a ladder between the knees. This, piety will suggest, is Christ, the King of Heaven, seated
on the throne of Heaven, holding open the Book of the Gospels, perhaps, and the closed Book of Life, to be opened by Him at the apocalypse. The ladder is, perhaps, a symbolism of Jacob’s ladder, by which heaven and earth were united, and thus a fitting symbol of Christ. It is a testimony to the skill of the symbolists that the figure can be interpreted in this fashion.
But to one schooled in esotericism, the symbol is capable of a very
different
interpretation. A closer glance at the figure reveals a carefully executed androgyny, neither fully masculine, nor fully feminine. Or rather, it is both fully masculine and feminine simultaneously. As such, it is equally an alchemical, as well as a Christian symbol, for it thus functions as a symbol of the physical medium itself, as alchemy understood it. Fulcanelli writes elsewhere “The spirit cannot but feel troubled in the presence of this even more paradoxical antithesis: the torch of alchemical thought illuminating the temple of Christian thought.”
4
From this vantage point, the rest of the relief decodes itself in very different terms. Fulcanelli notes that the famous cathedral, “like most French cathedrals, is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Virgin Mother.”
5
However, there is an esoteric and alchemical significance even in this, and the bas relief on the Great Porch reveals it:
In the place of honour, facing the parvis, alchemy is represented by a woman, with her head touching the clouds. Seated on a throne, she holds in her left hand a sceptre, the sign of royal power, while her right hand supports two books, one closed (esotericism) the other open (exotericism). Supported between her knees and leaning against her chest, is the ladder with nine rungs —
scala philosophorum
-hieroglyph of the patience which the faithful must possess in the course of the nine successive operations of the hermetic labour…
6
Beyond the fact that Fulcanelli has glossed the androgynous nature of the relief, the symbol could be taken straight from Vishnu’s first “tripartation,” the primordial nothingness standing over against him
after that initial “tripartation” in all its stark, undifferentiated femininity.
It is, Fulcanelli observes, “the seal of the secular Great Work” of alchemy “on the very face of the Christian Great Work.”
7
This Virgin Mother depicted here is “stripped of her symbolical veil” and thus