Notre-Dame de Paris and the alchemical portal: stones, virtues and legends
The Last Judgement portal of Notre-Dame, the figure with the ladder and the medallions of the virtues: history, restorations and alchemical readings.
In front of the central portal of Notre-Dame, the portal of the Last Judgement, generations of curious visitors have searched for something other than theology. At the base of the pillar dividing the two doors sits a female figure with her head in the clouds, a sceptre and two books, one open and one closed. A ladder rises against her. For the esoteric tradition she is Alchemy; for art historians she is more probably Philosophy, queen of the arts.
A cathedral of many centuries
Construction of Notre-Dame began in 1163, under Bishop Maurice de Sully, and continued for much of the thirteenth century. The west façade with its three portals was built in the first half of the thirteenth century. The central portal shows Christ the Judge, the weighing of souls by the Archangel Michael and the separation of the elect from the damned, following a scheme found throughout Gothic France.
What we see today, however, bears the deep mark of the restoration directed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus from 1844 onwards. During the Revolution many statues had been pulled down or mutilated, including those of the kings of Judah in the gallery of the façade, mistaken for kings of France. In the nineteenth century they were remade by sculptors of the day on the basis of drawings, fragments and comparisons with other cathedrals. Every interpretation must therefore reckon with this layering of periods.
Fulcanelli's reading
In 1926 Fulcanelli devoted to Notre-Dame the most famous pages of his Le Mystère des cathédrales. In the figure with the ladder he saw the personification of the hermetic art: the two books would be exoteric and secret knowledge, the ladder the degrees of the work. In the medallions below, where medieval handbooks recognise the virtues and vices, he read the operations of the laboratory: calcination, the keeping of the fire, the fixing of the volatile.
This is a personal and modern reading, confirmed by no thirteenth-century source. In Gothic programmes the virtues and vices often appear in contrasting pairs, such as Fortitude and Cowardice or Hope and Despair, and were intended for the moral instruction of the faithful. Fulcanelli's interpretation nonetheless enjoyed enormous success in twentieth-century esoteric thought, to the point that many visitors still look for the «figure of alchemy» before anything else.
The raven and the treasure
Fulcanelli also recorded a legend linked to the portal of the Virgin: the gaze of a carved raven would point to the spot in the church where a precious deposit lay hidden. Tradition also connected the cathedral with William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris from 1228 to 1249, whom a late rumour passed off as an alchemist. These are tales without documentary support, born as so often happens around great buildings.
The fire of 15 April 2019 and the reopening of the cathedral in December 2024 have drawn attention back to every stone of Notre-Dame. Looking at the central portal through the eyes of the historian and those of the reader of Fulcanelli means seeing two cathedrals superimposed: that of the medieval builders and that of the modern imagination.