Part One

” and that’s the whole story?”

“Yes, indeed it is. The “whole thing” as you say…” He stood up, shrugged his soft gray cashmere coat around his shoulders, and began to draw on his matching gloves. “You have all that you need, where to look, and whom to look up, and much of it you have already determined on your own. Do the research, do your “homework,” I believe, and you will understand it, eventually.” Carefully adjusting his fedora, he took up his walking stick and smiled down at me. “And when you are done,” he paused as with a small motion of his shoulders he arranged the drape of his clothes, ” write it up as a romance…”.

He strolled off, down the garden path toward the Luxemburg Palace, a fading gray speck in the bright spring sunlight.

In March of 1999, my co-author and I took a whirlwind research trip to France. We had been working for two years on a book on Fulcanelli and the odd predictions he made in the mysterious last chapter of the second edition of Le Mystere, put out after he was supposedly long dead, concerning the “double catastrophe” and the “season of judgment.” In two weeks, we covered as many of the possibly significant sites as we could, from Arles to Hendaye to Bourges and on to Paris, where we followed up at Notre Dame de Paris. Jay left a day before I was scheduled to fly out, so I had a day free to visit the French National Library. I wanted to see the infamous Secret Files from the Priory of Sion.

Naturally, since I was essentially a tourist to the great French book custodians, I was not allowed access to the Dossiers Secret. Disappointed, I headed back to our hotel on the Rue Raspail, and since I had time to kill, I got off at the Odeon station and walked through the Luxemburg Gardens. I found the spot where two days before we had videotaped the basic concepts that would become our book, and settled in to enjoy what looked to be a perfect early spring day in Paris.

I was running over in my mind all the different threads of the tapestry we had been tracing for the last two weeks, wondering how it would all fit together in the span of a single volume, when I slowly became aware of a curious figure leisurely but surely heading in my direction. He was tall, at least six feet, and dressed in what would have been the height of fashion in perhaps 1926; expensive cashmere overcoat, silk suit underneath, with one of those transitional collars on the shirt, cravat loosely Ascotted and trouser seams knife sharp. His shoes had white spats attached, and he wore gloves, carried a cane and sported a fedora. Everything but his shirt and his spats were a matching series of gray tones.

Trying not to stare, I scanned the rest of the area. No one else was around, except some students lounging around the fountains, far off in the center of the garden’s main boulevard. I looked back, and yes, he was definitely heading straight for me.

At first I was perplexed, but, as he was now close enough to get a look at his face, I had a sudden sense of recognition. He looked like a younger version of Christopher Lee, the English horror movie actor, and that was somehow as comforting as it was unsettling. I thought briefly of getting up, perhaps leaving before he got there, but all I managed was a lurching half rise. “Oh, don’t bother to get up,” a voice as smooth as the gray tones of his afternoon suit announced. “Do you mind if we just sit here and talk for a while?”

For the next hour or so, we spoke as old friends who had had these kinds of long afternoon talks, just so, just here, for decades. He never asked who I was, and he never gave me his name. It was all, well, casual in a sense that trying to describe it sounds ludicrous. Two strangers pretending to be old friends, discussing the greatest occult secrets of all time in quiet voices amid the birds and the blooms of the park.

But it happened, and from that encounter grew a sort of subtext or sub-plot within the vast amount of research we did for our two books, A Monument to the End of Time and Mysteries of the Great Cross at Hendaye. In December of 2003, two things happened, almost at the same time, which precipitated the next stage in the quest. The latest edition of our book was published, and I appeared on a TV show about Nostradamus. Mysteries contained the most complete explication of the subtext given to me by my curious informant, but not by any means the whole story. As the book began to spread among the alchemical cognoscente, I began to get some curious emails. These increased in number and crankishness as the Nostradamus show began to air on the History Channel. Everything from the disjointed note in bad French from one “Henri II” telling me what a prick Mickey of Our Lady really was, to cogent comments on some of the stranger points of my various interlocking theories. I read them all, and answer the ones that strike my fancy.

Soon after the first part of my article on the odd connections between Fulcanelli and the curious affair of Rennes-le-Chateau was published in New Dawn magazine, I received another email. An astute reader wanted to know why the thread concerning a “stone,” possibly a piece of the Black Stone of Abraham from the Ka’abba in Mecca, that could have been the literal prima material discovered and used by the Templar, dropped out of the book after the High Middle Ages. He correctly pointed out that the examples of literal alchemical transmutations in the 14th through 18th centuries suggest a dwindling and possibly unique supply of the stone of transmutation. Could the secret of its use have survived, but not how to make the Stone itself? Or could the source, the prima material, be truly unique?

Well, what could I say? The guy actually had me by a very sore point. Back in 1998, before Jay and I put together the first version of A Monument of the End of Time, I wrote a book length manuscript called “The Gnostic Science of Alchemy.” A version of “Part One: From Alexandria to the Black Death” can be found at my website and at other locations around the Internet, including Alchemy Journal, and it formed the basis for the first half of both Monument and Mysteries. However, I had stopped work on “Part Two: From Flamel to Fulcanelli” when it became apparent that the facts did indeed point, almost inescapably, to the conclusion my astute reader from down-under had spotted. The secret of how to use the Stone for the literal and physical transmutation had survived, but the secret of the nature of the Stone, its origin and its creation, seemed to have been lost.

And of course, I had turned up and included evidence for an artifact Stone in the first part of “Gnostic Science,” and used the information right on through Monument and Mysteries. Did I really believe what my own research had turned up? And even more important, did I really believe my anonymous informant from the Luxemburg Gardens?

Part Two

Let’s follow his suggestion and begin with a romance:

Once upon a time, there was a young squire named Wolfram who had the good fortune to travel with his Emperor to Arles for his coronation as King. While there he heard the first whispers of a new legend concerning something that would be called the Holy Grail. Later, after Chretien’s attempt at the story had become the equivalent of a medieval bestseller, Wolfram tried his hand at the yarn. He claimed that he had a better source and deeper insight into the story, went on to create one of the true classics of the middle ages, Parzival.

Wolfram’s version had many significant departures from Chretien’s original narrative. The most significant concerned the nature of the Grail itself. In Wolfram’s Parzival, the Grail is not a cup or a plate, or even a series of holy objects, it is a Stone, the stone of exile, or the stone that fell from heaven, depending on how you read Wolfram’s pun. This change removes the Grail story from its supposedly Christian roots and places it in a whole different realm, that of alchemy.

We know that much of the Grail legend has its origin in Provence and southern France in general. Wolfram would also write a romance on Wilhelm set in Septimania and Provence, and even Parzival can be largely mapped to southern France. But where did the idea that the Grail was a magical meteorite originate? That component cannot be traced to southern France; its closest cognates are all Middle Eastern, including Abraham’s flaming torch, the Kaaba Stone and even the Cybele stone from central Turkey. So how did these stories become part of the Grail Legend for Wolfram?

One clue, that is actually is a dead end, can be found in the legend of St. Maurice and the Theban Legion. The cup of the hallows, the spear, the sword, the cup and the platter, that St. Maurice’s men died to protect, was probably carved from the Cybele stone that was kept in the Matrona Temple in Rome. This is a dead end because the cup, and its probable connection to the Cybele stone, was unknown in Wolfram’s time. But the idea that the Grail was somehow a stone could have remained in the early stories.

The answer to our question takes us in an unusual direction, toward Bohemia. Wolfram claimed to be a Bavarian, but the probable location of his birthplace, somewhere in eastern Bavaria, makes him a subject of the King of Bohemia at the time of his birth. These were at best fluid loyalties, all tied to the person of the Holy Roman Emperor. After the death of Frederick Barbarossa, the Empire went into a period of anarchy and near civil war. We know that Wolfram fought in these wars, but we have no clues as to when, where or for whom. Curiously enough, one of the most likely places for Wolfram to have campaigned is Bohemia.

Ottokar I, “King” or Duke of Bohemia, spent these years scheming and playing one off the other in the Imperial struggles in order to secure for his family clear title to the rulership of Bohemia. It is likely that Wolfram either fought with Ottokar and Phillip of Swabia, or against them, in the period in which he was composing Parzival. Perhaps he even visited Prague while the ancient fortress at Vysehrad dominated it. That unfortunately, we will never know…

But the likelihood that Wolfram was in Bohemia at some point is very good, and as a careful listener to the local storytellers, he would have heard a curious legend.

Long ago, soon after the creation of the world but before man appeared, God and the Evil One fought a great battle in heaven. The Evil One lost, and was cast down into the far north of the world. As the archangel Michael struck the Evil One, a splinter from the great Green Stone was struck off and also fell to earth, landing in eastern Bohemia and Moravia. This essentially Persian/Iranian legend was told to explain the vast amounts of green glass-like stone found throughout the region.

In Wolfram’s imagination, this became the Grail Stone, the stone of exile and the stone that fell from heaven at the same time. But how did the story, originally Persian, get to Bohemia? Archeology has the answer, and it seems that soon after the Islamic conquest of Persia in the late 7th century groups of Zoroastrians began to migrate north and west into central Europe. By the 8th century, there were centers of Persian Mithraism in several places in central Bohemia, including Prague, where a Persian fire altar occupied the center of the old town, just about where Tynsky Chram is today. A century or so later, Bohemia became officially Christian, and the local legends got a gloss of Biblical authority. By the time Wolfram likely heard the story, it was as an extension of Genesis.

So, at the core of the Holy Grail legends lies a profound clue about the real secret of alchemy… Look for the meteorite glass…

Part Three

Alchemy, as an occult science, began in Alexandria in the century or so before the traditional birth date of Christ as an extension of what is now called “Gnosticism.” This spiritual perspective developed as a blend of Greek philosophy, Hebraic mysticism and Egyptian sacred science within the newly Romanized “world culture,” and it provided a stimulus to all kinds of intellectual endeavors for the next three centuries. Perhaps the most profound influence of the Gnostic worldview can be found in the early texts of alchemy.

One of the earliest of all alchemical manuscripts is the fragmentary “Isis the Prophetess to Her Son Horus” found in the Codex Marcianus, a medieval collection of Greek texts. This work seems to be a unique blend of Hebrew mysticism and Egyptian mythology that could only have come from Alexandria early in the first century C.E. In this seminal text, the Egyptian goddess Isis tells her son, Horus, that while he was away fighting and defeating the evil one, Seth, she was in Hermopolis studying angelic magic and alchemy from an angel, who is called Amnael. This higher angel reveals the mystery of his sign and then swears her to an oath. After this strange oath, Isis is told never to reveal the secret to anyone but her son, Horus, her closest friend. The knowledge will make them one—as the knowledge has now made Isis and the angel one.

And then a curious thing occurs. When the mystery is revealed, it seems strangely flat, as if something was left unsaid in the answer. Horus is told by Isis to watch a peasant, who may or may not have been the mythical boatman Acharontos. He is then given a lecture on “as you sow, so shall you reap.” Horus is told to realize “that this is the whole creation and the whole process of coming into being, and know that a man is only able to produce a man, and a lion a lion, and a dog a dog, and if something happens contrary to nature, then it is a miracle and cannot continue to exist, because nature enjoys nature and only nature overcomes nature.”

Isis goes on to relate that she will now give Horus the secret of preparing certain “sands.” She says: “One must stay with existing nature and the matter one has in hand in order to prepare things. Just as I said before, wheat creates wheat, a man begets a man and thus gold will harvest gold, like produces like. Now I have manifested the mystery to you.”

The instruction then passes to hands-on lab work in melting and preparing metals such as quicksilver, copper, lead, and gold. At the end of this lengthy preparation, Isis exclaims: “Now realize the mystery, my son, the drug, the elixir of the widow.”

The “Isis the Prophetess” fragment is in many ways the origin point of alchemy in its modern sense. It is the first text in which mysticism becomes conflated with some type of laboratory procedures. In the text, though, it is clear that Isis first imparts a philosophical understanding, and then she conducts a physical operation, supposedly along with Horus, in order to demonstrate the principle and illustrate her mastery of the process of transmutation. We might even think of this as the alchemical method: revelation, demonstration, and transmutation. The key then becomes the source of the revelation; where is the information coming from?

In the “Isis” fragment, the knowledge comes from a higher order of angel, implying that the higher realm from which it comes is at least at a planetary level or above. The higher angel Amnael that instructs Isis appears nowhere else in Hebrew angelology. There is a faint resemblance to the name of the angel of Venus, Hanael or Anael, but this line of conjecture quickly comes to a dead end, for if Isis is the morning star, is she learning from herself? It doesn’t seem possible.

An easier solution is to take the angel’s name, as it is, Amn-el, or the angel of Amon. Amon’s name means “the hidden one,” and Amon-Ra is the name of the sun god of Egypt. The Hebrew spelling of Amnael’s name gives us a clue to the nature of its composite being. Using Hebrew gematria, the letters in the name add up to 123, the number of the three-part name of God, AHH YHVH ELOHIM. These three names are also associated with the top three sefirot on the Tree of Life—Kether, Chokmah, and Binah. If we break the name into Amn and ael, we get the numbers 91 and 32. These are both references to the Tree of Life as a whole, 32 is the total number of paths and sefirot on the Tree, and 91 is the number of the Hebrew word amen, AMN, and the word for “tree,” AYLN.

The angel Amnael, a composite being, can be seen as the sum of all the knowledge in the revealed tradition. But before the angel will share the secret of alchemy with Isis, it swears her to a great oath. After this oath or initiation, the great being tells Isis the secret: “Only Nature can overcome Nature.” Isis later demonstrates this to Horus by means of a physical process. The transmutation is successful, and she produces “the drug, the elixir of the widow.”

Perhaps the most significant clue in the “Isis” fragment are those lines concerning certain types of sand, and their use in preparing what would later be called the powder of projection, or the catalytic substance that triggers the transmutation in other metals. Here we have a direct clue to the ancient Egyptian secrets of transformation.

In the ancient world, glass was a rare commodity, and the secret of how to make it was a closely guarded secret. The earliest glassworks in Egypt date from the New Kingdom era, just a few hundred years after glass was discovered in Iran. Curiously however, glass like pieces have been found in Old Kingdom tombs, more than a thousand years before it was discovered elsewhere. Assuming that they weren’t making it, then where did they find the yellow-golden glass?

A few hundred miles due west through the gap in the western mountains at Abydos lies a region of ancient salt lakes known as the Dakhla Oasis. Roughly 150,000 years ago, when the Sahara was a broad and fertile savannah, early humans lived along the lakes. Then one day, a huge meteor exploded just above the salt lake, killing everything for hundreds of miles, boiling the lake to salt beds and throwing millions of beryllium rich chunks of yellow-gold glass into the atmosphere. These chunks can still be found today in the region around the depression containing Dakhla Oasis.

The salt beds along the oasis trails became the sources for the natron used in the early mummification processes. The Old Kingdom in particular used the salt and yellow glass of Dakhla in many of its funeral procedures. Could they have sensed the unusual quality of this material, perhaps even its “higher” or off planet origin? Perhaps, given its otherworldliness, the yellow glass served as a reminder of eternity and so became part of the back-story of Egyptian religion.

Fairly early on however, the yellow glass of eternity became a metaphor for gold. “I am a soul. . . I (am) a star of gold. . .” Pharaoh/Osiris announces in the Pyramid texts, declaring that he has entered the state of being called “soul,” a state where the flow of spirit is self-sustaining, self-referencing and self-aware. To be such a soul is to have the possibility of immortality. He reinforces this by declaring that he has become “a star of gold.” This also has a very precise meaning. Gold, by its atomic geometry, is the most fractal or recursive element. The outer d/f electron sub-shells exhibit a 5/7 symmetry pairing, which gives gold the shape of a perfect dodecahedron-icosahedron fractal. The dodecahedron, the Pythagorean symbol of spirit, nests with the icosahedron, a symbol for water, to create a polygon that is a model of the crystalline structure of our planetary jewel, according to researchers such as Beth Hagen.The “star of gold,” khabs nbt in Egyptian, combines two expressions of infinity, a star in the heavens and the perfect metal, gold. In the early Dynasties of the Old Kingdom, the idea of a golden star that fell to earth became connected to the idea of gold as a perfect or divine metal. And this is perhaps the very origin point of alchemy.

So did the ancient Egyptians have the literal secret of transmutation? Given the disparity, particularly in the Old Kingdom, between the amount of gold available from the known mines in Nubia and the amount used, this seems very likely. But the secret was carefully guarded, and, although clues remained until the Gnostic influence produced classical alchemy, it seems that the core of the secret had been lost as far back as the first interregnum period. Dakhla Oasis was abandoned at that point, although the natron beds to the north were still the major source of the salt for mummification, and the glass fields around the oasis were ignored.

Meteoric stones, however, continued to impress the later Dynasties of the Old Kingdom. Part of the ancient meteorite strike near Giza became the ben-ben, or pyramidion, of On and Sakkara, and at least one of the magical tools used in the mummification ritual was thought to be made of meteoric iron. This connection to mummification gives us another clue.

Just a few centuries after Wolfram, every apothecary in Europe carried something called mummy dust, imported through the Ottoman Empire and sold as a cure all. This was in fact ground up mummy, from Egypt, and much of it from the earliest necropolis around Abydos. Surviving samples of this universal medicine have been analyzed, and in almost every sample significant amounts of gold were found. Could the process of mummification, using large amounts of natron from the western oasis, be similar to the long and slower alchemical process described by the texts?

Part Four

The Hebrew version of Amon in the “Isis” fragment points us in another direction, toward the Arabian Peninsula and the source point of all three monotheistic religions, the Patriarch Abraham. According to Biblical tradition, Abraham learned the great ancient secrets from Shem, the son of Noah, also known as Melchizedek. He was the Righteous King of Ur and Salem, which is now thought to be Jerusalem. The most important mysteries of the work of creation concerned the significance of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and their relationship to astrology and the mysteries of the calendar, or time. Attributing this wisdom to Abraham and Melchizedek places its origin in the 18th century BCE, the time of the rise of the New Kingdom in Egypt as well as the Vedic scholars of India.

Abraham was considered to be the greatest magician and astrologer of his age. The Talmud tells us that: “all the kings of East and West (Egypt and India) arose early (to wait) at his door.” The teachings of the work of creation are one of the primary astrological texts of the ancient world. This teaching incorporates the astrological wisdom Abraham was said to have known “in his heart,” that is, revealed to him through meditative or magical means.

Forty miles or so inland from Jeddah, in what is now Saudi Arabia, the town of Mecca sits at the juncture of pre-Islamic Arabia’s most important trade routes. The mile-long caravans from the spice kingdoms of southern Arabia, on their way to the world markets of Mesopotamia, turned north and east through the gap in the Hejaz Mountains near Mecca. Cargo from Africa — Abyssinia – now Ethiopia – lies just across the Red Sea — landed at Jeddah and moved inland for its first stopover at Mecca. The town thrived on trade and travelers. This is significant, because from its founding the town of Mecca was also an important sacred site and a destination for pilgrims. According to the tradition within the Quraish, Mohammed’s clan, Abraham and his other son Ishmael, who name means “God hears”, also founded Meccah.

From the Sepher Yetsirah, we learn of the Cube of Space (the twelve edges of the Cube are formed from the twelve double letters of the Hebrew alphabet which are attributed to the signs of the zodiac) within which the jewel-like Tree of Life forms. This astrological concept is attributed to Abraham just as the building of the physical Cube, the Ka’aba of Meccah with its sacred Black Stone, is also claimed as his work. This is the famous construct with its meteorite black stone that all Muslims attempt to touch at least once within their lifetime. A cube has twelve edges. Each of these edges relates to a different sign in the zodiac. The cube of space in Meccah, here on earth, is a fractal representation of the real cube of space.

The pilgrimage to Meccah still stands as a powerful example of the Islamic faith. According to Moslem tradition, the Ka’aba, or cube (from the same root), has been rebuilt ten times mirroring the number of spheres on the Tree of Life. Within the Cube is the sacred Black Stone, a piece of purplish-red tektite embedded in the wall of the southeastern corner about five feet from the floor — at just the right height for kissing. The Black Stone has been a part of the Cube, in Meccah, since at least the 4th version of the Ka’aba attributed to Abraham. Tradition states that the Stone represents the new, post-catastrophe covenant between God and the family of Abraham.

The book of Genesis tells us that, soon after Abram received the blessing of the God Most High, The Lord visited his word upon him in a vision. He commanded Abram to look up at the stars and count them if he could. God promises that Abram’s descendants will be as numerous as the stars, or possibly will be as the stars. All he has to do is make a covenant with the Lord by performing a peculiar ritual sacrifice. Abram is told to take five animals, split the heifer, the goat and the ram in two halves, and leave the two birds whole. The ten resulting halves can be attributed to the spheres on the Tree of Life, according to the sages of the Sepher Yetsirah.

Abram made his strange sacrifice of the split animals at sunset and fell into a deep sleep. We are told that thick and dreadful darkness came over him and the Lord spoke within it describing the future of Abram’s descendants. And then a curious thing happened. Abram had a vision of a smoking firepot with a blazing torch. According to most authorities this is an ancient symbol of the presence of the God Most High. This torch or pillar went through the gap between Binah and Tiphareth and Yesod and Tiphareth, or Gemini and Sagittarius. This, Genesis tells us, sealed the covenant between Abram and his god.

Later when he was 99 years old, The God Most High made a return appearance to confirm the covenant. This time the Lord changed Abram’s name to Abraham, by adding an h, or the Hebrew letter `heh’, in the middle. Heh is a pictogram of a window in ancient Hebrew. The Lord also instituted the rite of circumcision as a physical sign of man’s acceptance of the covenant. From this point on, Abraham’s descendants were the chosen people of the God Most High.

The Black Stone was the physical seal of this covenant, a gift from the sky, a token of God’s favor. It is interesting to note that the description in Genesis 15:17, that of the smoking firepot with a blazing torch coming out of it, suggests the path of a meteor through the sky. The actual placement of the Black Stone within the Ka’aba also suggests the northwest-southeast axis of the galaxy as seen in two dimensions. The stone that fell from heaven is a physical piece of evidence for the presence of the God Most High.

In many ways, this odd chunk of purplish-red meteorite is the most famous of its kind. It is the origin point of one religion, and the iconic focus of another. And while it does fit Wolfram’s idea of a rejected stone and the stone that fell from heaven, it has no direct connection with alchemy. That comes much later, and Wolfram will even supply us a few clues when we get there.

Part Five

However, the Ka’aba Stone was not the only magical meteorite in the Near East. Driving eastward along the modern road to Ankara, a stark and solitary mountain dominates the landscape. This is Mount Dindymus, the holy mountain of the ancient Phrygians, sacred to the mysteries of the goddess Cybele, Queen of Heaven and Mother of the Gods. On the southern slopes, a jumble of ancient and modern dwellings tumbles down toward the small river Gallus, a tributary of the Sangarius. Further up, just below the summit, a jumble of stones and walls mark the precinct of the ancient temple, looking in the afternoon sunlight like a ruined and tarnished crown.

This ancient pile of ruins was the sanctuary of the goddess who descended to earth as a stone, a large black and silver-flecked cube of a meteorite. Caves wind from the sanctuary all the way down to the river below, and the actual mysteries were conducted in large corbel-vaulted underground chambers. On Mount Dindymus, little remains of these chambers, but at the Cybele temple in Vienne, France, we can still see the walls of its crypt and its pillars. These massive underground chambers would provide the foundational support for many of the Gothic cathedrals, including Chartres, Notre-Dame-de-Paris, and Amiens, just as the myth of Cybele, and her Grail stone would provide the spiritual insight and soaring imagery.

The name is neither Greek nor Hittite, but is a word in the new Semitic languages pushing up from the south. It means “stone of the goddess” and comes from the same roots as Kaaba and al-Lat in Arabic. Indeed, given the similarity of names, and the cubic stone of Mecca with its original goddess worship and meteorite, the Sabeans, ancestors of the Hejaz Arabs, may have been Cybele worshipers. At any rate, the idea of a stonelike throne, the Cube of Space upon which the great L in the sky of Draco sits, is not too far from Kyb-ele, or stone of the El. It is also the “Precious Stone of the Wise” from the Bahir.

The worship of the Mother of the Gods was common to all the ancient traditions of Europe and the Middle East. The cult of Cybele, however, developed into what almost certainly was the first “mystery” school, and as such traveled from Anatolia to Rome and on to Provence. The major temples of the “mystery” of the Mother Stone of the Gods were located on the island of Samothrace, off the coast of Lydia in Asia Minor, Memphis in Egypt, Thebes in Greece, and at Nimes in Provence. The oldest and most important center remained at Pessinus on Mount Dindymus, where the cubic stone, the mystereion that contained the essence of the goddess, was kept.

Because of the fragmentation caused by time, cultures, and languages, we risk losing the larger pattern if we focus too closely on any one goddess figure or regional mystery teachings. Only by looking at all the versions of the myths and legends can we piece together anything resembling a complete picture.

Cybele was not only mother of the gods, but also mother of humanity. In some versions, as Rhea, she mated with her father Kronos and begat the Titans, from whom came both the Olympian gods and mankind. The images that have survived show her on a throne, which resembles the Egyptian glyph for Isis (a throne), and flanked by a pair of lions, an echo of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. In some images she is shown in a chariot drawn by a pair of lions. In her hands, she holds a circular drum or tambourine and a chalice full of the elixir of life. On her head is, usually, a tower or castle-like crown from which hangs a veil.

As Demeter, or as her daughter Persephone, she descended into the underworld and her return was accomplished with the aid of a clan of Titans, shamans and smiths who dwelt in caves. For their help, Cybele descended to earth as a cubic stone, which she gave into their keeping as the mysterieon, or objective focus for the mystery of the cult. As the guardians of the stone, they were called Kabiri, or Kabiroi, the people of the kaba, the stone, as well as the kabirim, the “mighty ones” in Aramaic and Hebrew. In some myths, these Kabiri are referred to as the children of Aphrodite and Hephaistos, the god of the forge and volcanoes, the latter from the Latin form of his name, Vulcan.

As both Strabo and Herodotus noted, the story of the Kabiri is very close to that of the Egyptian Heru Shemsu, another group of shaman-smiths with ties to pre-catastrophe knowledge and the guardianship, at Heliopolis, of another stone from heaven, the ben-ben or phoenix stone of the sun god Ra. Indeed, the relationship between Ra and his “Eye,” the goddess Sekhmet or Hathor, pictured as that of father and daughter, is very similar to that of Rhea and Kronos or Cybele and Zeus. Like the ben-ben at Heliopolis, the stone of the Mother Goddess was seen as the petrified sperm of the sky god.

The stone remained in the temple of Cybele on Mount Dindymus until the turn of the third century B.C.E. The tale of how the stone that fell from heaven became the stone of exile, to use Wolfram’s pun, was one of the grand yarns of the ancient world. In the depths of the Second Punic War, with Hannibal and his elephants rampaging at will on the Italian Peninsula, the Roman Senate lost faith in its gods. As they were tribal deities from Latinum and Etruscia with Greek glosses, they seemed unhelpful and insignificant in the face of the threat posed by the international power of the Carthaginians. The Roman Senate decided to fall back on that “old-time religion,” the worship of the Mother of the Gods.

Consultation of the Sibylline Books guided the Romans to seek aid from the same Great Mother known to their reputed ancestors of Trojan fame. The Delphic oracle agreed that it was time for Cybele to come to Rome. The king of Pergamus, under whose control the temple and stone at Pessinus lay, was not so enthusiastic. It took an earthquake and a comet or a brilliant meteor shower to convince him. Accompanied by the Gallae, the priestesses of the shrine, the stone departed by ship for Rome. Miracles occurred along the way, including an interval of divine navigation and an escort of dolphins. The noblest lady of Rome, Claudia Quinta, personally welcomed the entourage of Cybele at Ostia and pulled the ship ashore when it grounded on a sandbar with her own virtuous strength, an episode considered to be another miraculous sign.

At Rome, the Mother of the Gods was appropriately housed in the temple of Victoria, an echo of the shrine to Nike, victory, on Samothrace, in the five hundred fiftieth year after Rome’s semi-mythical founding. From distant Phrygia came her essence, the silver-and-black meteoric stone from the starry heavens, with a conclave of the Galli, male-born priestesses whose order had served the goddess for millennia. Rome initiated a thirteen-year construction plan to honor Cybele with a worthy Temple on the Palatine Hill. From Claudia’s own lineage would come many of Rome’s greatest, as the fortunes of Hannibal, and Carthage itself, withered like a dying branch.

The temple was called the Matreum, and the worship of the new civic goddess, the Magna Mater or simply Matrona, spread rapidly throughout the Empire, blending along the way with all the older forms of the Great Goddess. The stone remained in its domed temple until at least the mid fourth century when Julian the Apostate wrote a hymn dedicated to it and the goddess. “Who is then the Mother of the Gods? She is the source of the intellectual and creative gods, who in their turn guide the visible gods: she is both the mother and the spouse of mighty Zeus; She came into being next to and together with the great Creator; She is in control of every form of life, and the Cause of all generation; She easily brings to perfection all things that are made. Without pain She brings to birth . . . She is the Motherless Maiden, enthroned at the very side of Zeus, and in very truth is the Mother of All the Gods. . . .”

The Cybele stone disappeared sometime during the fifth century, a time when Rome underwent several catastrophes and lootings. It had apparently been split or divided in the mid 3rd century, becoming in its new form a beautiful cup, with dark blue-black ground and stunning white relief work in the silver parts of the stone. This was in fact the cup, part of the ancient hallows or regalia of St Maurice’s Theban Legion. It remains to this day in the small village of St. Maurice in the canton of Sion in Switzerland. And, while the legend of Cybele and her stone match Wolfram’s stone of heaven pun, the Cybele stone has never been connected to alchemy.

So has the trail from our clue of Wolfram’s, follow the meteorite glass, come to a dead end? Possibly, but Wolfram does supply us with another clue. In Parzival, the guardians of the sacred Stone are explicitly called Templars. Perhaps the history of that mysterious and misunderstand order might shed some light on the alchemical obscurities.

Part Six

By the end of the second decade of the twelfth century, most of the veterans of the First Crusade were dead. Godfroi de Bouillon, exhausted by his labors, died the year after the fall of Jerusalem, in 1100. Peter the Hermit had died in 1115, and Baldwin I, Godfroi’s brother, followed him in 1118. Things were changing in Outremer, the land beyond the sea, as the Franks called Palestine. Latin kingdoms, including Jerusalem, had been established from Syria to Gaza, but if they were to remain independent, it was time to look to their collective security.

With this in mind, soon after his coronation, Baldwin II, cousin of Godfroi and Baldwin, legitimized the only standing army in the Holy Land. Not being a truly feudal lord, in the sense Europe understood it, the king of Jerusalem had only his personal retainers and whatever Crusaders happened to be available with which to form an army. This left the kingdom of Jerusalem somewhat defenseless, as demonstrated by the Easter massacre of pilgrims by Turkish forces in 1119. As a reaction to this, Baldwin II turned to the only organized military force in the Holy Land, the militia of the Order of Our Lady of Zion, for protection.

That this milice du Christ existed before 1119 is shown by the reference to it in a letter from the bishop of Chartres to Hugh, count of Champagne, dated 1114. In the period immediately after the First Crusade’s conquest of Jerusalem, the only source of authority in the devastated city came from the remaining religious communities, among them the Order on Mount Zion. We know that Peter the Hermit was left in charge of the city while Godfroi went on to defeat the Egyptians at Ascalon, which, if Peter was a monk of Zion, meant that the order was actually in control. That the existing Order of Mount Zion had some military value is shown by Godfroi’s insistence on repairing its fortifications. Someone must have manned those defenses after they were built.

Given the unstable situation in Outremer, Baldwin II made the right choice. He recognized the military arm of the order, put them under the control of the king and the patriarch of Jerusalem, and installed them close at hand, next door to his palace on Temple Mount. The Poor Knights of Christ, as they called themselves, gained another name from Baldwin’s gift. They became the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, then Knights of the Temple, or Knights Templar, and finally, the Templars. Their stated purpose was to protect the pilgrim routes, but their numbers were too few in the beginning to protect more than the area around the Temple ruins. And perhaps that’s all they were intended to do.

To understand the Templars and their role in the Holy Land and Europe, we must see them in their proper perspective, that of a military adjunct to a much older organization. The Order of Our Lady of Zion did not create the Templars. The king of Jerusalem created them out of the order’s militia for a specific purpose.

The order itself had been reconfirmed and given its new name by Godfroi in 1099. Five years later, a private conclave of nobles and clergy assembled at Troyes, the court of the count of Champagne, to hear a mysterious abbot from Jerusalem and to discuss conditions in the Holy Land. Nothing is known of the subject of that discussion, but whatever it was, the wealthy and powerful Hugh, count of Champagne, decided to depart immediately for Jerusalem. He spent the next four years in the Holy Land, his activities and whereabouts unknown.

The location of the conclave in Troyes is highly significant. Peter the Hermit had stopped there on his winter preaching tour in 1096, and the family of the count of Champagne had been of interest to the chroniclers because of its connections with the Merovingian dynasty of Burgundy. Indeed, the reported nobles who attended the conclave, Brienne, Joinville, Chaumont, and Montbard, all have connections to the ancient Burgundian royal family. This alone would be enough to make one suspect that the mysterious Jerusalem abbot was from the Order of Zion.

Hugh, count of Champagne, remained in the Holy Land for four years. On his return to Champagne, things began to unfold rapidly. A distant relative, Bernard de Montbard, joined the Cistercian Order. Bernard, in just a few years, would become the principle spiritual leader of Western Christendom. His abbey at Clairvaux, donated by Hugh in 1112, became the center of the medieval spiritual revival, inspiring a wave of religious feeling that resulted in the glories of the Gothic cathedrals. Saint Bernard, as he would come to be known, played a key role in the establishment and the legitimization of the Templars. His uncle, André de Montbard, was one of the militia of Zion from which the Templars were formed.

Hugh of Champagne himself wanted to return to the Holy Land and join the order’s militia. The letter from the bishop of Chartres in 1114 was part of an attempt to dissuade him. Apparently his talents were needed in Champagne, and it was not until 1124 that he officially joined the newly renamed Order of the Temple. By that time, the Templars were solidly established with the support of a now wealthy and powerful Cistercian Order, headed by Bernard. In 1128, the Templars were recognized by the pope, Honorius II, and given a written rule or guide for their order by none other than Bernard himself. The council at which this occurred was held, of course, in Troyes at the court of the count of Champagne.

From these meager facts we are forced to intuit the story. The Order of the Chroniclers on Mount Zion appears to be the shadowy force directing the First Crusade, mostly through the activities and influence of Peter the Hermit. After the Crusaders captured Jerusalem, the order, through Peter, was left in virtual charge of the city and its monuments and churches. As we have seen, Godfroi and Baldwin were beholden to Zion for their thrones, and therefore would have allowed the order free access to anywhere in the city they wanted to explore or excavate. Sometimes during the five years from the conquest to the conclave in Troyes, the order discovered the secret it had been seeking for over a century.

Zion sent word of this discovery back to Europe, but not to Rome or any of the other capitals, but Troyes. Whatever this discovery was, it so moved Hugh that he left for Jerusalem and spent four years in secret studying it. Immediately after his return in 1108, the wheels of power moved so that one of his adherents, the young Bernard of Montbard, became the head of an orthodox monastic order. When Bernard joined the Cistercians they were almost bankrupt. Within a decade they were the wealthiest monastic order in Europe, with money to fund the creation of a whole new style of architecture, the Gothic cathedrals.

Therefore, in some way, this discovery of a secret or an artifact led to a flow of unparalleled wealth a few years later. From this discovery and its flow of wealth would come the need for the Templars, whose first and basic activity seemed to be guarding the precinct of Solomon’s Temple. But the mere secrets of alchemy alone, even if it were an ancient Solomonic version, would not of itself produce a flow of wealth. Something else was required. As the later alchemists inform us, nothing can be accomplished in the Great Work without the right prima materia. It is possible that what the Order of Zion found, perhaps in the ruins of the Temple of Solomon, was the best prima materia possible, a piece of the Black Stone, the meteorite from Mecca. Just possibly, this was the true “rock of Zion” on which the kingdom of Jerusalem was founded.

The Order of Chroniclers was given the use of Mount Zion by the mad caliph al-Hakim. Al-Hakim’s great grandfather, al-Mansur, was the first and only person since Muhammad known to have close personal contact with the Black Stone. It stayed in his presence for months after it was presented to him and before it was returned to the Kaaba. Most significantly, we cannot be sure how much of the stone was returned.

The Iranian Ismailis, soon to become friends and allies of the Templars, may have kept a piece before it was given to al-Mansur. The Fatimid caliph himself may have decided to keep a piece. That the stone shrank in its absence from the Kaaba is known from Muslim descriptions of the building of the ninth and tenth Kaabas, which tell us that the stone was large and filled the entire space of the southeast corner, protruding out so that one did not have to stoop to kiss it. In the current Kaaba, as described by Sir Richard Francis Burton in the nineteenth century, the stone is encased within the wall, leaving only a portion about seven inches long and four inches wide exposed for kissing. Since it was only removed from the Kaaba for those brief years in the mid tenth century, any carving or splitting of the stone had to have been done at that time.

The madness of al-Hakim can be partially explained by his possession of his great-grandfather’s chunk of the stone. Shi’ite tradition claimed that at the turn of the fourth century after the Hejira, or departure from Mecca, the Mahdi, or savior, would appear and convert the entire world to Islam as a prologue to the Day of Judgment. In 1109, al-Hakim, the foremost Shi’ite leader of his day, announced the arrival of the Mahdi in his own, now divine, person. It was the year 400 A.H. If indeed al-Hakim had a piece of the rock, sign of the holy covenant with Abraham, then it is possible that this knowledge could have unhinged the caliph enough for him to convince himself of his own divinity. Fearing the stone’s power, al-Hakim could have hidden it on the Dome of the Rock, perhaps within the ruins of Solomon’s Temple, in Jerusalem.

If the stone was in Jerusalem the whole time, why did it take a Crusade for the Order of Zion to gain possession of it? One reason lies in the madness of al-Hakim. As part of his Mahdi-hood, he persecuted the Christians and the Jews, burning their churches and synagogues. Even though he repented of the destruction before his death or disappearance, access to the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount itself was restricted to Muslims from that time onward. Once the Seljuk Turks conquered the city, all access to the Holy Sites was restricted. And at that point, Peter, the Hermit of Mount Zion, departed for the West to start the political process that, eleven years later, would bring the order back into control of the Temple and the Dome of the Rock.

Sometime between 1099 and 1104, it is possible that the Order of Zion made at least two discoveries, either together or separately, in Jerusalem. The first was perhaps a text explaining the mechanics of the physics of creation and its application to the process of transmutation. The second might well have been have been the mad caliph’s piece of the Black Stone. Word of this discovery was sent back to France, where, upon receiving the information, Hugh of Champagne and his entourage, possibly including a few Hebrew scholars, departed immediately for Jerusalem.

Between 1104 and 1112, the Order of Zion completed its work and perfected the process of transformation. From 1112 onwards, money in great quantities flowed back to France and into the coffers of Bernard’s Cistercians. A power base was built on this wealth that forced Baldwin II to legitimize the military wing of the order in order to protect his throne. The Templars were formed to guard the source of this wealth, the alchemical processes that were perhaps being conducted in the cellars of the great Temple.

While this view of events is admittedly speculative, it does have value; it answers the many questions that gather around all facets of the Templars’ history. And it points up a truly curious fact. Before the Templars, alchemy was a decidedly theoretical science. After the Templars, we find documented tales of actual transmutation. The conclusion is forced upon us that something resembling our speculations must indeed have occurred.

The Templars continued to gain power in Europe at the same time as the Cistercians were beginning their cathedral-building program. Both of these movements were financed from mysterious sources, and both had indirect and hazy connections to the Order of Our Lady of Zion. It is possible to see Saint Bernard and the Cistercians as the spiritual and social parts of a great plan to revitalize Western culture. The Templars were the political and military components of that plan, protecting the secret and its source of wealth. The cathedrals, those vast alchemical monuments in stone, were designed to facilitate the new spiritual change necessary as a prelude to the coming thousand years of peace and prosperity.

The history of the Templars from 1128 until their demise is well documented and too familiar to need much further elaboration. By 1143, the Templars had become the exclusive military arm of the papacy, and remained a powerful force in Outremer even after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187.T he Order of Zion, after losing its abbey on Mount Zion, seems to have moved to France, with chapters in Orleans, Bourges, Paris, and Troyes.

For a century after the discoveries in the Holy Land, alchemy remained the secret preserve of the initiates within the Church. The Order of Zion and the Templars seem to have had their own alchemical processes and their own individual codes for referring to it. Not until the middle of the thirteenth century did alchemy surface in a direct and unambiguous way.

The greatest scholar of the thirteenth century, Albert the Great of Cologne, or Albertus Magnus, turned to alchemy around 1250, and produced the first original work on the subject since the late fifth century. His treatise, On Alchemy, champions alchemy as a difficult but true art. He does not tell us if he actually made gold, but his directions to the practitioner indicate not only knowledge of the triple nature of alchemy, but an awareness of the changes in the political winds. He warns the alchemist to choose the right hour for his operations, be patience and diligent in his prayers and exhortations, operate by the rules (here Albert gives us the necessary steps: trituration, sublimation, fixation, calcination, solution, distillation, and coagulation, seven in all), and to always avoid contact with princes and rulers.

Albert was also reputed to have had a fortune-telling “head” and seems by contemporary accounts to have been an adept of the Hebraic work of creation. We are told that he had constructed an artificial man, a golem, endowed with the ability to speak but not to reason. The golem’s inane chattering so disturbed Albert’s pupil, the future saint, Thomas of Aquinas that Albert finally had to destroy it. Another interesting alchemical story, related by William II, count of Holland, has Albert setting a feast in the frozen and snow-covered garden of the monastery, only to have it magically become summer, with birds, butterflies, and blossoming trees, as the diners sat down to their meal.

Intriguing as these suggestions are, it was not the aristocratic Albert the Great who brought alchemy firmly into the mainstream of medieval thought, but the humble scholar Arnold of Villanova. Arnold was born in Valencia about the time that Notre-Dame-de-Paris was finished. He gained his initial fame as a physician, and could be called the first psychologist, having written a surprisingly modern work on the interpretation of dreams. Although seemingly not a member of any monastic or clerical order, Arnold conducted secret missions for kings, emperors, and popes alike.

In his works, Arnold emphasized the reality of alchemical transformation. To demonstrate this, he performed a transmutation in front of Pope Boniface VIII. It was successful, the first documented account of such a transmutation. A witness, John Andre, the major domo of the Papal Curia, reports that Arnold “submitted the gold sticks he produced to everyone for examination.” This is very significant for the simple reason that since the second century, no one, no matter how much they seemed to know about alchemy, had actually done the transmutation in front of witnesses. Arnold’s performance in front of Boniface was the turning point in alchemical history. Unfortunately, it was also the beginning of the end for the Templars, and in a lesser way, for the Order of Zion.

One of those observing Arnold’s transmutation was the future pope Clement V. Bertrand de Got, the former archbishop of Bordeaux, became the first pope of the so-called French captivity after the strife caused by Boniface VIII’s assertion of absolute papal rights. The king of France, asserting a higher spiritual and political authority than the pope, swooped down on Rome and literally captured the Church. Eleven months later, Bertrand, a Frenchman, was finally elected as Clement V. Arnold, unfortunately, had been in the thick of the political infighting.

Phillip, the French king, used his power over the pope to recall Boniface’s proclamation. And then the king set in motion an idea that had been stirring in his brain since Arnold’s demonstration. The king called a general council and proscribed the Templars. Pope Clement V, wanting his piece of the vast Templar wealth, went along with Phillip, even though he knew the charges against the Templars were basically groundless. The Templars thus ran afoul of a greedy French king and his puppet of a pope and were persecuted as heretics. Just as the missing link in the Templars’ origin appears to be alchemy, so too does it appear that their downfall was also caused by alchemy.

The Grail romances provide us with direct connections to the Templars as guardians of the secret, as well as glimpses of the “miraculous stone” at the heart of the mystery and a general tone of transformation and transmutation as a subtext. The sudden emergence of the long secret “illumination” sect, the sages of the Bahir, in a public form in the West, supplies us with the missing philosophical and kabbalistic clue needed to see the larger pattern of what might be called astro-alchemy, which, as Fulcanelli informs us, was in turn memorialized in the Gothic cathedrals.

During the height of their influence, from 1150 to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, three different facets of the alchemical secret surfaced in the West and produced a kind of Gothic renaissance. In this emergence, the book and stone of the Templars and the Grail romances became the book in stone of the Gothic cathedrals. Behind this transformation is the theology of Light as expressed in the Bahir and made real in the lux continua architectural style of the new cathedrals.

Part Seven

The original monks were given the use of Mount Zion by the mad caliph al-Hakim. Al-Hakim’s great grandfather, al-Mansur, was the first and only person since Muhammad known to have close personal contact with the Black Stone. It stayed in his presence for months after it was presented to him and before it was returned to the Kaaba. Most significantly, we cannot be sure how much of the stone was returned.

Abu Abdallah, the founder of the Fatimid Dynasty, was a member of the Ismaili secret society, and the inner teachings of the Seveners became the core of the Fatimid Grand Lodge of Cairo. While the Fatimids consolidated their control over North Africa and Egypt, another Ismaili group seized power in Iran with the intention of re-creating the Persian Empire along Ismaili lines. This movement burned itself out by the mid 10th century, but not before it had conquered Meccah and carried off the Black Stone itself. The Stone was presented to the Fatimid Caliph al-Mansur, who restored it to the Kaaba in 951.

The Iranian Ismailis, soon to become friends and allies of the Templars, may have kept a piece before it was given to al-Mansur. The Fatimid caliph himself may have decided to keep a piece. That the stone shrank in its absence from the Kaaba is known from Muslim descriptions of the building of the ninth and tenth Kaabas, which tell us that the stone was large and filled the entire space of the southeast corner, protruding out so that one did not have to stoop to kiss it. In the current Kaaba, as described by Sir Richard Francis Burton in the nineteenth century, the stone is encased within the wall, leaving only a portion about seven inches long and four inches wide exposed for kissing. Since it was only removed from the Kaaba for those brief years in the mid tenth century, any carving or splitting of the stone had to have been done at that time.

The madness of al-Hakim can be partially explained by his possession of his great-grandfather’s chunk of the stone. Shi’ite tradition claimed that at the turn of the fourth century after the Hejira, or departure from Mecca, the Mahdi, or savior, would appear and convert the entire world to Islam as a prologue to the Day of Judgment. In 1109, al-Hakim, the foremost Shi’ite leader of his day, announced the arrival of the Mahdi in his own, now divine, person. It was the year 400 A.H. If indeed al-Hakim had a piece of the rock, sign of the holy covenant with Abraham, then it is possible that this knowledge could have unhinged the caliph enough for him to convince himself of his own divinity. Fearing the stone’s power, al-Hakim could have hidden it on the Dome of the Rock, perhaps within the ruins of Solomon’s Temple, in Jerusalem.

If the stone was in Jerusalem the whole time, why did it take a Crusade for the Order of Zion to gain possession of it? One reason lies in the madness of al-Hakim. As part of his Mahdi-hood, he persecuted the Christians and the Jews, burning their churches and synagogues. Even though he repented of the destruction before his death or disappearance, access to the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount itself was restricted to Muslims from that time onward. Once the Seljuk Turks conquered the city, all access to the Holy Sites was restricted. And at that point, Peter, the Hermit of Mount Zion, departed for the West to start the political process that, eleven years later, would bring the order back into control of the Temple and the Dome of the Rock.

Sometime between 1099 and 1104, it is possible that the Order of Zion made at least two discoveries, either together or separately, in Jerusalem. The first was perhaps a text explaining the mechanics of the physics of creation and its application to the process of transmutation. The second might well have been have been the mad caliph’s piece of the Black Stone. Word of this discovery was sent back to France, where, upon receiving the information, Hugh of Champagne and his entourage, possibly including a few Hebrew scholars, departed immediately for Jerusalem.

Between 1104 and 1112, the Order of Zion completed its work and perfected the process of transformation. From 1112 onwards, money in great quantities flowed back to France and into the coffers of Bernard’s Cistercians. A power base was built on this wealth that forced Baldwin II to legitimize the military wing of the order in order to protect his throne. The Templars were formed to guard the source of this wealth, the alchemical processes that were perhaps being conducted in the cellars of the great Temple.

While this view of events is admittedly speculative, it does have value; it answers the many questions that gather around all facets of the Templars’ history. And it points up a truly curious fact. Before the Templars, alchemy was a decidedly theoretical science. After the Templars, we find documented tales of actual transmutation. The conclusion is forced upon us that something resembling our speculations must indeed have occurred.

The Templars continued to gain power in Europe at the same time as the Cistercians were beginning their cathedral-building program. Both of these movements were financed from mysterious sources, and both had indirect and hazy connections to the Order of Our Lady of Zion. It is possible to see Saint Bernard and the Cistercians as the spiritual and social parts of a great plan to revitalize Western culture. The Templars were the political and military components of that plan, protecting the secret and its source of wealth. The cathedrals, those vast alchemical monuments in stone, were designed to facilitate the new spiritual change necessary as a prelude to the coming thousand years of peace and prosperity.

The history of the Templars from 1128 until their demise is well documented and too familiar to need much further elaboration. By 1143, the Templars had become the exclusive military arm of the papacy, and remained a powerful force in Outremer even after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187.T he Order of Zion, after losing its abbey on Mount Zion, seems to have moved to France, with chapters in Orleans, Bourges, Paris, and Troyes.

For a century after the discoveries in the Holy Land, alchemy remained the secret preserve of the initiates within the Church. The Order of Zion and the Templars seem to have had their own alchemical processes and their own individual codes for referring to it. Not until the middle of the thirteenth century did alchemy surface in a direct and unambiguous way.

The greatest scholar of the thirteenth century, Albert the Great of Cologne, or Albertus Magnus, turned to alchemy around 1250, and produced the first original work on the subject since the late fifth century. His treatise, On Alchemy, champions alchemy as a difficult but true art. He does not tell us if he actually made gold, but his directions to the practitioner indicate not only knowledge of the triple nature of alchemy, but an awareness of the changes in the political winds. He warns the alchemist to choose the right hour for his operations, be patience and diligent in his prayers and exhortations, operate by the rules (here Albert gives us the necessary steps: trituration, sublimation, fixation, calcination, solution, distillation, and coagulation, seven in all), and to always avoid contact with princes and rulers.

Albert was also reputed to have had a fortunetelling “head” and seems by contemporary accounts to have been an adept of the Hebraic work of creation. We are told that he had constructed an artificial man, a golem, endowed with the ability to speak but not to reason. The golem’s inane chattering so disturbed Albert’s pupil, the future saint, Thomas of Aquinas that Albert finally had to destroy it. Another interesting alchemical story, related by William II, count of Holland, has Albert setting a feast in the frozen and snow-covered garden of the monastery, only to have it magically become summer, with birds, butterflies, and blossoming trees, as the diners sat down to their meal.

Intriguing as these suggestions are, it was not the aristocratic Albert the Great who brought alchemy firmly into the mainstream of medieval thought, but the humble scholar Arnold of Villanova. Arnold was born in Valencia about the time that Notre-Dame-de-Paris was finished. He gained his initial fame as a physician, and could be called the first psychologist, having written a surprisingly modern work on the interpretation of dreams. Although seemingly not a member of any monastic or clerical order, Arnold conducted secret missions for kings, emperors, and popes alike.

In his works, Arnold emphasized the reality of alchemical transformation. To demonstrate this, he performed a transmutation in front of Pope Boniface VIII. It was successful, the first documented account of such a transmutation. A witness, John Andre, the major domo of the Papal Curia, reports that Arnold “submitted the gold sticks he produced to everyone for examination.” This is very significant for the simple reason that since the second century, no one, no matter how much they seemed to know about alchemy, had actually done the transmutation in front of witnesses. Arnold’s performance in front of Boniface was the turning point in alchemical history. Unfortunately, it was also the beginning of the end for the Templars, and in a lesser way, for the Order of Zion.

One of those observing Arnold’s transmutation was the future pope Clement V. Bertrand de Got, the former archbishop of Bordeaux, became the first pope of the so-called French captivity after the strife caused by Boniface VIII’s assertion of absolute papal rights. The king of France, asserting a higher spiritual and political authority than the pope, swooped down on Rome and literally captured the Church. Eleven months later, Bertrand, a Frenchman, was finally elected as Clement V. Arnold, unfortunately, had been in the thick of the political infighting.

Phillip IV, the French king, used his power over the pope to recall Boniface’s proclamation. And then the king set in motion an idea that had been stirring in his brain since Arnold’s demonstration. The king called a general council and proscribed the Templars. Pope Clement V, wanting his piece of the vast Templar wealth, went along with Phillip, even though he knew the charges against the Templars were basically groundless. The Templars thus ran afoul of a greedy French king and his puppet of a pope and were persecuted as heretics. Just as the missing link in the Templars’ origin appears to be alchemy, so too does it appear that their downfall was also caused by alchemy.

The Grail romances provide us with direct connections to the Templars as guardians of the secret, as well as glimpses of the “miraculous stone” at the heart of the mystery and a general tone of transformation and transmutation as a subtext. The sudden emergence of the long secret “illumination” sect, the sages of the Bahir, in a public form in the West, supplies us with the missing philosophical and kabbalistic clue needed to see the larger pattern of what might be called astro-alchemy, which, as Fulcanelli informs us, was in turn memorialized in the Gothic cathedrals.

During the height of their influence, from 1150 to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, three different facets of the alchemical secret surfaced in the West and produced a kind of Gothic renaissance. In this emergence, the book and stone of the Templars and the Grail romances became the book in stone of the Gothic cathedrals. Behind this transformation is the theology of Light as expressed in the Bahir and made real in the lux continua architectural style of the new cathedrals.

Part Eight

Just after sunset on March 17th, 1314, Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and last Grand Master of the Order of Knights of the Temple, and his fellow Templar Geoffroy de Charney were led to the stake on the small isle de juifs, the island of the Jews, at the head of the Isle de Citie in Paris. Tradition has it that de Molay cursed the French royal line and called both the Pope and the French King to judgment before God within the year. As it happened, both did indeed die within the year, and the 300-year old House of Capet collapsed during the next 14 years. Louis XVI, the unfortunate King who lost his head during the Revolution, was also a descendent of Phillip IV through his grand daughter, Joan II of Navarre. And so, as someone shouted from the crowd during his execution, Jacques de Molay perhaps had his revenge after all.

Within fifty years, Europe would be swept by the perfect storm of famine, disease and disaster known since the 19th century as the Black Death. The collapse actually began with the fall of the Templars, who had essentially become the bankers and guarantors of trade across Europe and deep into the Middle East. In the aftermath of their destruction, international trade collapsed, and the famine that started in 1314 soon became widespread and continued for almost twenty years. During this time, the merchant bankers of Venice and Genoa tried to fill the gap, and their attempts at opening trade into the Crimean region in the 1340s led directly to the pandemic.

The Mongol descendents of Genghis Khan had created a vast empire in central Asia, one where trade and armies and population traveled freely, due to what is now called the Pax Mongolica. The Genoese traders established a port on the Black Sea at Caffa in the Crimea, buying it from the Mongol Golden Horde soon after the Templars were persecuted. By 1347, the Mongols wanted it back, and attacked with an army under General Janibeg. A siege ensued, and as the Mongol army fell ill with a strange new disease, they disposed of their dead by catapulting them over the city walls. The disease devastated the defenders, and the fleeing Genoese brought the disease with them to ports all across southern Europe.

Caffa wasn’t the only transmission point; there many other ports on the Black Sea controlled by or in contact with the Mongols, and there were overland routes as well. Over the next year however, the disease spread across the Mediterranean and into southern Europe. By late 1349, it had reached Scandinavia and Scotland and was advancing across central Europe from Bucharest to the Duchy of Brunswick. The population, weakened by famine and other widespread epidemics in the 1330s, died by the millions. Somewhere between 25 and 50 million people, 30 to 50 % of Europe’s population, died in the disaster.

The Black Death changed the entire landscape of society in the west. The Catholic Church was hit the hardest, sanctity was no security it seemed, and the uncertainty of survival led to the philosophy of live for the moment found in Boccaccio’s Decameron. The lack of peasants to work the land led to improvements in technology and upward mobility for a new middle class. The Devil also gained in status, becoming a real threat to God’s work in the aftermath of the plague, which led to various persecutions of outsiders, including Jews and lepers, and of course, the witches.

According to an account published in the early 17th century, Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures, the entire history of alchemy shifted in the 1370s when a philosophy minded Parisian book dealer named Nicholas Flamel discovered an ancient book in Latin that claimed to be the “Sacred Book of Abraham the Mage to his people.” Flamel devoted his life to understanding the book, and on a pilgrimage to St. James de Compostella in Spain, he found a conversio, or converted Jew, who explained the process to him. Returning to Paris, he and his wife Perenelle worked for three years until in 1382, on January 17th, the feast of St. Roche, they were successful in completing the transmutation of mercury into silver. In April they completed the work on gold.

Someone named Flamel did actually live in late 14th century Paris. His house, thought to be the oldest in Paris, still exists and civic records show that he was a very generous person with access to a substantial amount of wealth. His tombstone, rescued from the church he founded, also still exists and can be seen in the Cluny Museum. The bare facts do seem to provide evidence for the truth of the legend, but something about the story is off kilter. And why did it take two hundred years, long after the images described were gone, for the Exposition to be published?

Up to this point, the history of alchemy has been somewhat straight forward, if obscure, but from here on, things just get stranger and stranger. After the destruction of the Templars and the disruptions of the Black Death, alchemy and alchemists apparently went underground. Flamel’s story, with its suggestions of hidden secrets turning up in manuscripts being reused by scribes and clerics, has the ring of truth to it. In the late 1300s society was in turmoil and what had been carefully guarded was now discarded in the streets along with the dead bodies of their owners. So it seems plausible that an earnest seeker could find the secret and make it work, with help of course from the magic of the Kabbalah.

But when we turn to the actual text of the Exposition, we find numerous errors and odd points – no mention of the current Hundred-Years War, whose lines Flamel and his Jewish friend had to cross on their journey from Spain, and no mention of the plague, which had returned in 1378 and was ravaging Paris – that increase the suspicion that it was invented in the early 17th century for the specific purpose of backdating a “real” transmutation. The question of course is why?

The French edition of the Exposition was published in 1614, making it roughly contemporary with the Rosicrucian Manifestos. It would perhaps be useful to view the legend of Nicholas Flamel in the same context as that of Christian Rosenkruz, to whom there are many parallels and overlaps. Both legends point to the recovery of a great secret, involving the alchemy of matter and the alchemy of time, and both postulate, or create, a mythical figure with which the recovery is associated. Once again, the question is why?

The Church, which could never decide if the Templars were actually heretics, had no real problem with alchemy. Pope John XXII, and his contemporary Cardinal Orsini, had their own personal alchemists. Letters exist from one John Dastyn, a monk apparently in one of the teaching orders, who had his own advanced ideas on the theory of alchemy. Dastyn was apparently more successful in convincing the Pope than he was at actual transmutation, however John XXII died a very rich man, leading some of his contemporaries to speculate on his alchemical wealth.

But ideas on alchemy continued to surface, including one of the most famous of all alchemy texts, Petrus Bonus’ New Pearl of Great Price. Bonus himself informs us that he was never successful himself in completing the great work, but his explanations, including the idea of the philosopher’s stone as a kind of leaven or yeast, suggests that he had an uncommon degree of insight. Bonus’ work drew heavily on Arabic sources, and the so-called Latin Gerber of the previous century, and was eagerly studied for the next three centuries.

So if Flamel had made his discovery in the 1380s, why would he hide it? Why not publish his book and promote his “hieroglyphs”? Even if was not trying to attract unwanted attention, which would have been hard the way he was spending money, there is no reason to just hide the manuscript away. No matter which way we view it the legend of Flamel remains problematic.

It becomes even more so when we turn to the alchemists of the 15th century. There is the enigmatic Christopher of Paris, who attained a degree of fame around mid century as a proponent of Cabala of Ramon Lully, and who appears never to have heard of Flamel. Christopher of Paris would have the most reason of any of the 15th century alchemists to point to and approve of a local phenomenon such as Flamel, yet his theories go in an entirely different direction, with nothing even remotely suggestive of Flamel’s hieroglyphs.

Another 15th century alchemist influenced by Lully was the celebrated George Ripley, who started an English school of alchemy that would survive, in one form or other, until the late 16th century. Ripley was born around the time Flamel was supposed to have died, roughly 1414, in a village near Harrogate, outside London. His early life is unknown, but apparently he studied alchemy in Rome and Louvain, and most interestingly of all, with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem on the island of Rhodes.

Provence was the home of the other major military order, the Knights of Saint John of the Hospital, also known as the Hospitallers in the same way as the Knights of the Temple became the Templars. Founded by papal bull in 1113, fifteen years before the Templars, the Knights of the Hospital were the creation of a single knight, Gerard, whose family name and birthplace are unknown. Like the later Templars, the Hospitallers also held Saint John as their patron. Exactly which Saint John is open to some doubt, but most likely Saint John the Baptist. Their rule, provided by Raymond of Provence in 1130, says nothing about any military role at all. That changed over time, and the Hospitallers were at least the equals of the Templars in battle during the last days of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and their bitter rivals in its politics.

In contrast to the situation in Outremer, both orders of knights, white with red crosses for the Templars and black with white crosses for the Hospitallers, flanked Frederick I Barbarossa at his coronation as king of Arles in 1178. In Provence, this closeness continued even after the fall of Jerusalem, resulting in several calls during the thirteenth century for their unification. The Templars remained a powerful presence in the region; even after the pope and the French king Philip ordered their arrest. In 1311, four years after the arrest, supposedly, of every Templar in France, nine knights from Provence showed up to defend the order at the Council of Vienne.

They were actually successful. The Church never officially declared the Templars guilty of anything, but King Philip, who was on the scene with a large contingent of troops, carried the day, and the Templars were dissolved as a religious order and then subjected to the secular justice of the French king. The leaders went to the stake, but the regular knights, particularly in Provence, were allowed to join another chivalric order to avoid arrest. In this way, many commanderies of the Templars passed with all hands directly to the Knights of Saint John, soon to become the new Knights of Rhodes, and then finally the still surviving Knights of Malta.

George Ripley claimed to have studied alchemy with the very organization that would, in all likelihood, have inherited the secrets of the Templars. That makes his story of great interest. The legend, promoted indirectly by Ripley, claims that he generated 100,000 English pounds of gold a year for the Knights, allowing them to make significant inroads against the Turks. By 1471, he was back in England, and a cannon of the Augustinian priory at Bridlington, where his neighbors complained of the smells issuing from his laboratory. That year he presented his “Compound of Alchemy” to Edward IV, and in 1476, he published his “Marrow of Alchemy,” dedicated to the Archbishop of York. While never directly claiming to have completed the work, Ripley comes closest to having both a theoretical insight and practical experience.

Two of Ripley’s students, Thomas Norton and William Holloway, Prior of Bath Abbey, are also important in the history of alchemy. Norton was the author in 1477, of the Ordinall of Alchimy, which followed Ripley’s ideas closely. Ripley had in fact been in contact with Norton, and we speculate that Norton learned from Ripley of the stone “glorious fair… and bright” required for the powder of projection. Ripley’s other student, the Prior of Bath, kept a small supply of the red powder, perhaps given him by Ripley, in the wall of the Abbey. After the Crown dissolved the Abbey in 1525, Holloway discovered that his elixir had disappeared. A few years later, he met a young student of the art, Thomas Charnock, and told him of his disappointment. Charnock went on to write a small book, entitled “A Book on Philosophy,” which he dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. In it he claimed to be able to perform the Great Work at the Queen’s wish. Fortunately perhaps for Charnock, the Queen never saw the book, and it disappeared soon after.

Holloway’s vials of the red powder, hidden in the wall of an Abbey, suggests another English alchemist and his red powder, discovered, he claimed, at Glastonbury. Whether Charnock and Edward Kelley had the same Ripley inspired red powder can never be known at this distance. But the link is curious, and the timing of Charnock’s eventual success, supposedly in 1579, and Kelley’s arrival at Dr. Dee’s door in early 1581, makes it at least plausible that they were the same.

However, before we move on to the adventures of Dee and Kelley, there is one more 15th century figure to examine. Paracelsus, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenhiem, was probably the most picturesque of the Renaissance era alchemists. He was described as being always drunk and always lucid, and took the alchemical “ethos” in a somewhat different direction. Paracelsus didn’t deny the possibility of the transmutation of metals, but his interests were always more toward the medicinal aspects of alchemy. In this vein, he did much to influence the early development of modern medicine. On the subject of practical alchemy, Paracelsus had so little to say that we can safely assume that he was only an alchemist by tradition, not inclination.

Originally posted at https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FWMSdiscussion/conversations/messages/6545, May 15, 2009