Fulcanelli

The teaching

Taught from the two books, Le Mystère des cathédrales (1926) and Les Demeures philosophales (1930).

The book of stone

The books teach that the Gothic cathedral is a book in stone. Built for all and open to all, it sets out in its sculpture, for anyone with eyes to read it, the great work of alchemy: the matter, the operations, the colours and the end. Its builders and their learned patrons, in this teaching, knew the hermetic art and wrote it into the porches beside the stories of scripture, in a language that the many pass by and the few can read.

The language of the birds

The key to that language is sound. Words are read by their echoes and their puns rather than their spelling, in what the books call the language of the birds, or the phonetic cabala. Art gothique, Gothic art, is in their reading only a misspelling of argotique: the art of argot, the cant of the initiates. Argot leads in turn to the Argonauts, who sailed in the Argo for the golden fleece, an image of the work itself, and the books hear in cabala the cavalier, the rider who carries the knowledge. The student learns to listen for such echoes in names, inscriptions and carvings.

Alchemy at the door of Notre-Dame

At Notre-Dame of Paris the reading begins at the central porch. On the pillar between its doors sits a woman on a throne, a sceptre in one hand and two books in the other, one open and one closed, the outward science and the hidden; a ladder of nine rungs stands before her, the patience the work demands through its nine operations. She is Alchemy, the books say, set at the very door of the church. In the medallions beside her the work goes on in figures, beginning with the raven, the sign of the black stage with which every true work begins.

The matter and the fire

The matter of the work, the books hold, is common, found everywhere and despised by all, and the secret fire that moves it is no common fire. They speak of two ways: the long or wet way, in glass over a gentle heat for months, and the short or dry way, in a crucible over a strong fire, in days. Neither the matter nor the fire is named plainly; the books point, and the reader must find.

The houses of the philosophers

The second book carries the same reading from the churches to the houses. At Bourges the Lallemant house hides in the coffers of its chapel ceiling a run of emblems of the work, and the house of Jacques Coeur bears carvings read as the merchant's knowledge of it. At the château of Dampierre-sur-Boutonne the ceiling of the gallery is divided into coffers, each with its emblem and motto, which the book reads one by one as stages and maxims of the art. A sundial at Holyrood in Edinburgh and a carved salamander at Lisieux are read the same way: the knowledge, in this teaching, was left in plain sight by those who held it, for those who would one day look.

The cross of Hendaye

To the second edition of the first book was added a chapter on a stone cross at Hendaye, near the Spanish border, whose carved signs it reads as foretelling the end of a cycle of the world and a great renewal by fire, as in the alchemist's reading of the letters on the cross: by fire nature is renewed whole. The work in the vessel and the life of the world, in that chapter, follow one law of death and rebirth.

What the books ask of the worker

Behind the emblems stands a rule for the worker: simplicity, patience, humility, and prayer joined to labour, for the work is the work of nature, which the artist only helps. The stone that crowns it, the books hold, is a medicine of metals and of men, and the one who seeks it for gold alone does not find it.

The stages and the stone are taught on the alchemy art's branches The four stages and The philosopher's stone, and, as there, nothing of the laboratory is to be tried: the old work used mercury, antimony and lead, which are poisons.