The Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. perspective during the second year of the new millennium, cosmic end-of-cycle perspective, World War I, the Great War, to those who lived through it, feels as ancient as all those other senseless wars in history. Our only connections with that conflict are faded, sepia-toned images of our ancestors killing each other for reasons vaguely understood, even to themselves. Most people, even in this listening audience, would be hard put to explain exactly why World War I was fought and why so many men went to give their lives in it. And demoted by an even greater war, one so large that nothing but the title World War could possibly encompass it, the Great War became a mere fancy dress prelude to an entire century of destruction and horror. And indeed, the 20th century was exactly that. The bloodiest, most devastating, most destructive century in the history of the world. Reading of the ideals and passions of that long-forgotten era feels embarrassing to most of us now. If we think of it at all, we assign it an emotional value somewhere between a massive industrial accident and the migration of lemmings to the sea. When we look back through history, we find many wars and disasters, plagues and conquests, volcanic eruptions, climatic changes and mass migrations. But ladies and gentlemen, we find nothing quite like the Great War. Four hundred years of European intellectual, moral and technical superiority created and fed the engines of industrialized murder. These forces, in turn, consumed the very social order which had created them. And after four years, the self-proclaimed masters of the universe lay broken and bleeding in the wasteland, saved from ultimate extinction only by the interference of the United States and its revolutionary republic. Cultural suicide, perhaps? An apocalypse by any other name, ladies and gentlemen, is still an eschatological event. It's the end of the world for the inhabitants of that world. For example, near the end of the Great War, in September of 1918, the Turkish 12th Army, holding the ridgeline in front of Damascus, which included the ancient mound of Medigo, was attacked and destroyed by the combined use of airplanes, tanks, and cavalry. This battle, eerily described in St. John's Revelation, chapter 16, suggests that Armageddon occurred in 1918. Not only is the battle clearly delineated, but it occurred in the midst of the worst plague since the Black Death of the 14th century. Revelation's apocalypse looks much like the history of the 20th century, leading up to one final millenarial explosion. Could this be true? Well, ladies and gentlemen, the millennium has come and gone, and so we know it has not as yet occurred. There's always the possibility that our method of keeping time is not the same. A method used in predicting time by John in his book of Revelation. Was the prophecy of Revelation an ongoing process that essentially started sometime before the Great War? Was the 20th century an unfolding of the final book of the Bible? When the Great War finally ended. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the Old World, with its noble and imperial ways, was well and truly dead. The victorious allies propped up the corpse of Europe, and using all the tricks of the undertaker's trade, gave it the brief appearance of animation. This lasted just long enough to necromancy a treaty together at Versailles. It decomposed soon enough, its stench conditioning Europe, for the burned bacon aroma of the Nazis soon to come. But while it lasted, this zombie summer of fast-fading European superiority galvanized the entire world. The epicenter of this fleeting renaissance was Paris, the City of Light. During the war, this city had been the goal for which millions of men had marched, fought, bled, and died. As it had been for centuries, Paris was a symbol to both sides in the conflict, of something irrepressible in the human character. After the war, it became a mecca, for all those who felt that the world must be changed somehow, by the horror and sacrifice of the war. And that this change must mean something, say something, and do something. They went to Paris like insects drawn to the light of immolated cultures, having burned their candles all at once in the final auto-defe of European civilization. They firmly believed that out of that conflagration would come a better world. Same dreamers dreaming the same dream. And so they came to Paris to help create that world. Mystics, visionaries, painters, poets, artists of all kinds, scientists, political thinkers, revolutionaries, expatriates, all looking for that new world of hope. peace, and freedom. Which they felt must grow out of the war to end all wars. The conflict, they thought, had made them all equal now. They mingled on the boulevards. They drank. They talked at the cafes, and bars, and bookstalls. They plotted and painted late into the night and small cold water flats in the Montmartre, or danced and drank in the nightclubs and demimod's dives of the Latin Quarter. As if driven by deep-rooted survival guilt, everyone wanted to live fast, fully, and gloriously. Paris, in the post-apocalyptic 20s, appeared to be the light of the world, the flashpoint of history, and the beginning of the end of time itself. And remember that statement, the beginning of the end of time itself. Remember that, because I'm going to repeat that theme throughout this broadcast. Out of all this too brief, efflorescence emerged artistic, literary, social, political, and scientific concepts that shaped much of the rest of the 20th century. From the surrealists, such as Hans Arp, and Marcel Duchamp, to the mathematics of Paul Dirac, to the literary pyrotechnics of James Joyce, the idea of transformation, transformation bubbled, just below the surface. Remember that also, for that will be, too, a recurring theme. It was at the venus of this transformative undercurrent that in 1926, an anonymous volume, issued in a luxury edition of 300 copies only by a small Paris publishing firm known mostly for artistic reprints, rocked the Parisian occult underworld. Its title, The Mystery of the Cathedrals. The author, Fulcanelli. He claimed that the great secret of alchemy, the queen of western occult science, was plainly displayed on the walls of Paris' own cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris. And he was right, as you've heard on previous broadcasts. In 1926, alchemy by our post-modern lights, a quaint and discredited renaissance pseudo-science, was in the process of being reclaimed and reconditioned by two of the most influential movements of the century, surrealism and psychiatry, stumbled onto alchemy at about the same time. And each attached their own notions about reality to the ancient concept. Carl Jung spent the twenties teasing out a theory of the archetypal, unconscious form of the symbolic tapestry of alchemical images and studying how these symbols are expressed in the dream state. The poet, philosopher, André Breton, and the surrealists made an intuitive leap of faith and proclaimed that the alchemical process could be expressed artistically. Breton, in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, announced that surrealism was nothing but alchemical art. Fulcanelli's book would have an indirect effect on both of these intellectual movements. Indirect, ladies and gentlemen, and here we begin this great mystery, indirect because the book managed a major literary miracle. It became influential while remaining apparently completely unknown outside of French occult and alchemical circles and remember there were only 300 copies in existence. Now this is perhaps the strangest of all the mysteries surrounding the mystery of the cathedrals. One illustration suffices to show the magnitude of the occasion. the occasion, ladies and gentlemen, being the occlusion, the hiding, the secreting of the source of all that was influenced. take any art history text on the Gothic cathedrals written in the last 30 years and look at what it says about the obscure images found on the walls and entranceways of Notre Dame. You will find, four times out of five, that alchemy is mentioned as a possible meaning for these vaguely Christian images. You will also find, especially if the textbook is in English, that Fulcanelli and the mystery of the cathedrals are not ever given as a source or mentioned in any way whatsoever, although it is the only source from which such information could have been obtained. There was, and you may have seen it, a popular television special in alchemy hosted by Leonard Nimoy. It used the very same images from Notre Dame that Fulcanelli presents in his book, describes them in direct Fulcanelli paraphrase, and never ever mentions the source as Fulcanelli are Les Mysteries des Cathedrals. It's as if the concept entered common usage without ever being individually articulated. Do you believe that? Well, we may call this the dog that didn't bark in the night effect, like the dog that doesn't make a sound while the house is robbed. Fulcanelli's work is conspicuous by its absence. On the other hand, the book's widespread influence suggests an importance far beyond the antiquarian idea that the cathedrals were designed as alchemical texts. To understand the silence, it might be a good idea to try and understand Fulcanelli. The earliest known incident where his name was ever mentioned was in 1926 when publisher Gene Schmidt received a visit from a small man dressed as a pre-war bohemian with a long asterisk, you know, that big Gaul-style mustache. thick. Crossing the midline of the face above the lip but not curled up or hanging down. The man wanted to talk about Gothic architecture. The green argot of its sculptural symbols and how slang was a kind of punning code which he called the language of the birds. A few weeks later, Mr. Schmidt introduced to him again as Jean, or Jean in the French, Julien Champagne, the illustrator of a proposed book by a mysterious alchemist called simply Fulconelli. Mr. Schmidt thought that all three, the visitor, the author, and the illustrator, were the same man and perhaps perhaps they were. And this is the most credible Fulconelli sighting beyond this. He exists as words on a page and in some occult circles as a mythic, alchemical, immortal with the status or identity of a Saint Germain. There were two things that everyone agreed upon concerning Fulconelli. One, he was definitely a mind to be reckoned with, and two, he was a true enigma. What seems to have happened is that Fulconelli's student, a young occult upstart named Eugene Cancillier, offered the publisher the manuscript of The Mystery of the Cathedrals, or in French, Les Mysteries des Cathedrals. Schmidt bought it and Cancillier wrote a preface for the book in which he stated that the author, his master Fulconelli, had departed this realm. What he meant by realm, no one really knows. He then goes on to thank Julian Champagne, the man whom Schmidt thought was Fulconelli, for the illustrations. Champagne, a minor symbolist artist, an inventor far into an absent fueled decline, had gathered around him a small entourage, including Cancillier. The talk always centered around alchemy, when they met in the small cafés of the Montmartre. Champagne lived nearby, in the Rue de Roche-Chouart, and his sixth-floor room in the crumbling Parisian tenement was often the scene of late-night symposiums on all sorts of occult subjects. Now, this country, when I say occult, many people shiver and sort of cross their arms across their chest in fear. Occult simply means secret or hidden. It has no connotation of evil, unless, of course, it's used in an evil matter. It is simply hidden information. To his young friends, he must have seemed like a ghost from another age, with his unfashionably long hair, his riddles, his mustache, and most of all, his claim to know the secrets of alchemy. At the time, no one else but Chimette seemed to believe that Julian Champagne was Conciliers' master, Fulcanelli, his taste for great quantities of Pernod and Absinthe, indicated a man too dissipated to be as knowledgeable and erudite as the author of cathedrals. However, he certainly did know a real alchemist, whoever Fulcanelli was, and his illustrations show that he indeed had a profound understanding of the alchemical art. No doubt about it whatsoever. So we are left with the unsolvable mystery of the missing master alchemist, a man who does not seem to exist, and yet is recreated constantly in the imagination of every seeker who treads the path. A perfect foil for projection. We might even think, with all of jokes, some kind of massive elaborate hoax. except for the material itself. When one turns to mystery of the cathedrals, he finds a witty intelligence who seems quite sure of the nature and importance of his information. This Fulcanelli knows something and is trying to communicate his knowledge of this, there can be no doubt. Fulcanelli's main point, the key to unraveling the mystery, lies in an understanding of what he calls the phonetic law of the spoken Kabbalah, or the language of the birds. words. This punning, multilingual wordplay can be used to reveal unusual and, according to Fulcanelli, meaningful associations between ideas. What unsuspected marvels we should find if we knew how to dissect words, to strip them of their barks and liberate the spirit, the divine light which is within. Fulcanelli writes, he claims that in our day this is the natural language of the outsiders, the outlaws, and heretics at the fringes of society and a secret communication method used by the adepts of all of the mysteries. words. Now I'm going to depart from Fulcanelli for just a few seconds and I'm going to read you a quote from St. John 1, verse 1 of the King James Bible. St. John 1, verse 1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. There's more to language than most of you would ever even want to believe. This language of the birds was also called the green language of the Freemasons. All the initiates expressed themselves in cant. Fulcanelli reminds us, who built the art Gothic of the cathedrals, ultimately the art cot, or the art of light, is derived from the language of the birds, which seems to be a sort of earth language taught by both Jesus and the ancients. It is also related to the Sufi text by Ashar the chemist entitled The Conference of the Birds. In Des Passés French translation of this work, which Fulcanelli references, the conference of the title, is translated as language. Des Passés goes on to explain the complex linguist metaphor beneath the simple fable. And Fulcanelli uses the same method to decode the alchemical meaning of the cathedrals. Fulcanelli also claims that Revalet, Gargantua, and Pandagruel is a novel in Kant that is written in the secret language. You've heard me discuss this before on many, many broadcasts. The Secret Language, the Lost Word of Freemasonry. of the jumping四 de shall move to the crew worth with them. Like the wichtige animation that represents his nose Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You don't see it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 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