Fulcanelli and the mystery of the cathedrals: a reading to handle with care
Who was Fulcanelli and what does Le Mystère des cathédrales of 1926 claim? The story of an alchemical reading of Gothic art and of its limits.
In 1926 a book appeared in Paris that would change the way many readers look at Gothic façades. It was called Le Mystère des cathédrales, bore the signature of Fulcanelli and a preface by Eugène Canseliet, who presented himself as his only pupil. The plates were drawn by Julien Champagne. The thesis was bold: the sculptures of Notre-Dame, Amiens and Bourges supposedly concealed, beneath the veil of Christian themes, the stages of the alchemical work.
An author without a face
Fulcanelli is a pseudonym, and his identity remains unknown. Over the twentieth century several names have been proposed: Champagne himself, the bookseller and scholar Pierre Dujols, Canseliet himself, even René Schwaller de Lubicz. None of these hypotheses has been conclusively proven. In 1930 a second book appeared, Les Demeures philosophales, devoted to Renaissance palaces and mansions. The mystery of the author contributed greatly to the success of the texts, which were reprinted, translated and commented upon for decades.
The language of the birds
Fulcanelli's method rests on what he calls the language of the birds or phonetic cabala: a play of assonances in which words would reveal hidden meanings. The best-known example is the link between art gothique and argot, the slang of initiates, or between Gothic and a supposed art goth. These are fanciful etymologies with no linguistic basis: the term Gothic arose in the early modern period as a polemical label for an art judged barbarous.
Yet the procedure has literary and evocative value. Fulcanelli reads the cathedral as a book of stone, an idea that in fact goes back to the Middle Ages itself, when carved and painted images were considered the writing of those who could not read. Victor Hugo, in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris of 1831, had already celebrated the Gothic building as a great book of humanity, destined to be supplanted by printing. Fulcanelli takes up this Romantic suggestion and bends it towards hermeticism.
What historians say
Art historians interpret Gothic portals as theological and teaching programmes, built on biblical, liturgical and encyclopaedic texts. The French scholar Émile Mâle, in his L'Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France of 1898, showed how closely those sculptures follow the scheme of the great medieval specula, the encyclopaedias that ordered nature, history and morals. The personifications of the liberal arts, the months, the vices and the virtues have precise and well-documented sources.
No medieval document attests to an alchemical programme in the French cathedrals: neither contracts, nor chronicles, nor builders' treatises. It must also be remembered that many statues, at Notre-Dame as elsewhere, were torn down during the Revolution and remade in the nineteenth-century restoration, and therefore cannot bear witness to the intentions of builders who lived six centuries earlier. Every serious symbolic reading must begin by checking what is truly medieval and what is not.
Fulcanelli's book should therefore be read as a work of early twentieth-century French esotericism, not as a historical key to the Gothic. In this sense it is a valuable document: it tells of the Parisian milieu of the 1920s, of the passion for alchemy as a spiritual path, of the desire to rediscover a lost knowledge in the stones. It also remains an invitation to look at façades with an attention to detail that is all too often lost in the haste of a visit.