Message #43097

[Bianca]

Alchemy and Fulcanelli


Dissatisfied with the scientific prejudices of the present time, Schwaller sought kindred spirits in the past. The study of alchemy fed his appetite for spiritual knowledge. Unlike many drawn to the occult, Schwaller's interest in science gave him a hard-edged, practical mind, unsatisfied with vague talk of higher worlds. Esotericism, he believed, should include factual knowledge of how the world worked; he rejected Jung's interpretation of alchemy as a purely psychic affair. Alchemy was a spiritual practice involving the consciousness of the alchemist, but it also involved objective insights into the structure of matter. This belief in the reality of objective knowledge fueled Schwaller's later investigations into Egyptian civilization.

He was fascinated with the esoteric secrets of Gothic architecture and became acquainted with the man whose name is most associated with the "mystery of the cathedrals," the pseudonymous Fulcanelli. Sometime between 1918 and 1920 in Montparnasse, Schwaller met Fulcanelli, who had gathered a band of disciples around him, aptly called "The Brothers of Heliopolis." (Schwaller would later claim that the word alchemy meant "out of Egypt.") Alchemy had found a home in the strange world of the Parisian occult underground, and Fulcanelli and the Brothers of Heliopolis studied the works of the great alchemists, like Nicolas Flammel and Basil Valentinus.

Fulcanelli and Schwaller met often and discussed the Great Work, the transmutation of matter, a possibility that the recent advances in atomic theory seemed to bring closer to reality. Then one day, Fulcanelli told Schwaller about a manuscript he had stolen from a Paris bookshop. While cataloguing an ancient book for a bookseller, Fulcanelli discovered a strange piece of writing: a six-page manuscript in fading ink, describing, Fulcanelli claimed, the importance of color in the alchemical process. But, said Schwaller, when it came to alchemy, Fulcanelli was a materialist, and so he didn't grasp the true nature of color. Schwaller enlightened him.

Tired of the distractions of Paris, Schwaller moved to Grasse, in the south of France, where he invited Fulcanelli to join him in an alchemical retreat. There, after much work, they performed a successful opus, involving the secrets of "alchemical stained glass." The peculiarly evocative reds and blues of the rose windows of cathedrals like the unearthly Chartres had eluded artisans since the Middle Ages. In Grasse, Schwaller and Fulcanelli may have cracked the formula.

But there was tension between the two, and the suspicion exists that Fulcanelli stole more than a manuscript from a bookseller. The ideas for his most famous work, The Mystery of the Cathedrals (1925), are said to have been taken from Schwaller de Lubicz. Fulcanelli returned to Paris and against Schwaller's advice, tried to perform their work again. He wasn't successful. This was, Schwaller claimed, because Fulcanelli left out essential ingredients known only to him. Ignoring Schwaller's warnings, Fulcanelli persisted in performing the work in Paris. But his strange death from gangrene, a day before he was to reveal the secret to his students, brought an end to his opus.