Terra Umbra - Empire of Shadows

The Queen of the Sabbath

2012-01-09T04:13:00.000-08:00

“...Be thou from hell or heaven, say, what matters it, O Beauty! Fearful sphinx ingenuous, if alone. Thy foot, thine eye, thy smile, unbar the Infinite which I have always loved and never yet have known...” - Baudelaire

( i ) Queen to two Kings

Anne de Bretagne was twice queen of France. She was descended from the house of Foix on her mother Marguerite's side and during her reign she became the wealthiest and one of the most powerful women in all of Europe. Intelligent and well educated, it was said that she possessed one of the finest libraries in the world, knew several different languages and was versed in the hermetic cabala and reportedly highly clairvoyant. She was made queen by her second marriage at the tender age of 16. A description of her at the time states, “she is of small height, slender, and she walks with a visible limp, even though she wears high heels shoes to hide her deformity. She is of dark complexion and is fairly pretty. Her wit is remarkable for her age and once she has set her mind on doing something, she makes sure she succeeds, by all means necessary and at any price.”

Anne's union with Charles VIII was reputedly not a happy one and it is said she brought two beds with her to the marriage and the King and Queen often lived apart. She was crowned Queen of France at saint-Denis on 8 February 1492 and later became Queen of Sicily and titular Queen of Jerusalem following her husband's conquest of Naples. Although pregnant for most of her adult life none of the children produced by her union with Charles survived beyond early childhood.

Charles VIII died in 1498 and Anne, who was now 21 years old and still childless, returned to rule Brittany where she was rapturously received by her vassals. She ordered production of a coin bearing her name and began to gather about her court in Nantes a circle of poets and thinkers, including the Italian humanist Publio Fausto Andrelini who was to spearhead the growth of 'New Learning' in France.

Anne's third marriage ceremony, marking her union with the new king Louis XII, took place on 8 January 1499. She wore white, setting a precedent for all future brides and while her new husband formally assumed supreme executive power over Brittany he continued to recognize her sovereign right to the title 'Duchess of Brittany'. Anne would defend the Duchy's independence until the end of her days and was considered a beloved patroness by the Breton people who referred to her 'the good duchess with the wooden shoes', or sabbots as they are known in France. Of course Anne didn't really wear wooden clogs. Rather it is safe to assume that the affectionate nickname conceals more than one layer of punic meaning. Most accounts of Anne's life concern her regency, but when we start to examine the symbolism in the works of art and literature commissioned by her a whole new story begins to emerge. Hidden in plain sight, or beneath the soles of her shoes so to speak, are a wealth of esoteric analogies detailing the secret transmission of an arcane tradition.

( ii ) Her legacy

The Duchess commissioned a book of manuscripts, a 'Book of Hours', known as 'The Great Hours of Anne of Brittany' and the famous unicorn tapestries currently on display at The Cloisters museum in New York were commissioned to celebrate her wedding to Louis XII. The two most generally accepted interpretations for the cycle of tapestries hinge on pagan and Christian symbolism. The more archaic interpretations focus on the medieval lore of beguiled lovers, whereas Christian writings attempt to reposition the unicorn and its death as a metaphor for the Passion of Christ. This revisionist thinking allowed the traditionally pagan symbolism of the unicorn to become acceptable within religious doctrine. The original myths surrounding The Hunt of the Unicorn refer to a beast with one horn that can only be tamed by a virgin; subsequently, Christian scholars translated this into an allegory for Christ's relationship with the Virgin Mary. A third, alchemical interpretation of the imagery in the tapestries however is possible in which the unicorn becomes analogous with the White Stone as the fabled beast can only be tamed by the touch of a pure woman just as the 'White Tincture' can only be experienced by purifying the feminine forces within our beings.

“The unicorn and I are one.

He also pauses in amaze

Before some maiden's magic gaze,

And while he wonders, is undone.

On some dear breast he slumbers deep

And treason slays him in that sleep.

Just so have ended my Life's days;

So Love and my Lady lay me low.

My heart will not survive this blow.”

- Love song by the poet Thibaut, King of Navarre - 13^th century

In 1508, royal portraitist and hermeticist, Jean Perreal, painted a famous tableau ( above ) that now hangs in the Musée Dobrée in Nantes, depicting Anne de Bretagne receiving Antoine Dufour's manuscript praising famous women, a text that refers to a number of her illustrious antecedents, among them Joan of Arc and the celebrated Esclarmonde de Foix, the last high priestess of the so-called 'Cathars''.

An attendant monk has his arms folded in a manner suggestive of the cosmic lemniscate, the symbol of infinity while the predominant colours in the tableau are black, gold and red, shades richly evocative of the sacred priestess tradition and the Great Work. Behind Anne's seated figure hangs a veil decorated with a palm leaf and pomegranate motif, a symbol of the union of male and female principles that serves to further reinforce the alchemical interpretation of the unicorn tapestries as well as instantly bringing to mind the image of the High Priestess, the second trump of the Tarot's major arcana. In the earliest surviving deck to bear inscriptions, the 18^th century woodcut Marseilles Tarot this figure is crowned with the Papal tiara and is believed by some to be identified with the legend of Pope Joan. Others identify this trump with intuition, the unconscious or the Shekinah, the feminine aspect of the divine. A crescent moon floats in the menstrual tide at her feet, a horned diadem adorns her head reminiscent of the Egyptian goddess Isis and a solar cross appears on her breast, again symbolizing the union of male and female principles. A scroll rests on her lap, half hidden by her veil or mantle symbolizing esoteric and exoteric knowledge. Behind her two pillars, explicitly identified with Jakin and Boaz, the twin pillars of the temple of Solomon support a tapestry embroidered with palm leaves and pomegranates that veils the further, deeper mysteries that lie beyond.

( iii ) The sepulchre

11.11.11

The morning of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the 21^st century was unseasonably warm in Nantes. Sunlight glimmered on the tumid waters of the Loire as we made our way through the broad, river front streets towards the imposing gothic edifice of St. Pierre's Cathedral that lies just beyond the château of Anne of Brittany.

We paused to admire the profusion of gargoyles and stone effigies that adorn the cathedral's great porch. Then, as we started up the steps the great doors swung wide as if on cue and for a moment we couldn't escape the uncanny sensation that our pilgrimage had been anticipated, our every movement since arriving in Nantes somehow guided and foreshadowed by a lattice of coincidence. Certainly our timing could not have been more perfect. It was just before 11.00 am and as we stepped aside a vast, sombrely dressed procession emerged from the maw of the basilica.

Bishops, prelates and lesser clergy lead the cortège in sumptuous robes and tall hats clutching ornate staffs and croziers, followed by uniformed veterans and widows dressed in black carrying flags. It slowly dawned on us that we had arrived at the tail end of a Mass held to commemorate the French version of Memorial Day. Taking in the widows in their 'weeds', we were struck by the fact that Anne de Bretagne was the first queen to insist on wearing only black after her husband died, and joked between ourselves that she must have been one of the very first 'goths'. Did she have any idea, we wondered, how that one fashion choice would make such an impact on the generations that followed her.

Then we crossed the threshold to enter the body of the church, our eyes slowly adjusting to the hazy golden half light.

On either side of the nave vast columns of white stone soared upwards to the vaulted ceiling that curved high above and a short way down the right hand aisle we could readily make out the object of our pilgrimage. The mausoleum of Anne's beloved parents, Duke Francis II and Marguerite de Foix, was initially erected in 1507 at the church of Carmes but during the French Revolution it was dismantled and hidden by an anonymous patron who did not want to see it destroyed like so many other works of art at the time.

As above, so below: The mausoleum of Duke Francis II and Marguerite de Foix - created by sculptor Michel Colombe from the original designs by Jean Perreal

The mausoleum was only re-erected at its current location in the Cathedral of Saint Peter in 1819 which goes a long way towards explaining the immaculate condition of its pristine slabs and the effigies that adorn them. The ingenious work of sculptor Michel Colombe, following the elaborate plans drawn up by Jean Perreal, principal hermeticist and tomb designer to the court of Queen Anne, wears its five centuries lightly. Indeed the monument described by Fulcanelli in 'Les Demeures Philosophales' ( The Dwellings of the Philosophers, 1930 ) as 'one of the purest masterpieces of the Renaissance' is almost shocking in its modernity, as if the master sculptor laid down his chisel only days ago. The guardians of the vault, pale, implacable figures representing the four virtues, each one standing a good six feet, still hold silent vigil over the slumbering bodies of the Duke and Duchess, mute sentinels of an ancient tradition.

The reclining figures of Anne's parents are so lifelike they look as if they might awaken at any moment like characters from Perrault's Sleeping Beauty. A stone lion rests at Duke Francis's feet and beside it, at Margaurite's feet, crouches a faithful greyhound.

As above: Between the greyhound's forepaws this loyal beast guards a blazon representing the union of the house of Navarre and the house of Foix.

So Below: Saint Martha - the patron Saint of Marguerite de Foix.

Twelve smaller figures appear in sconce's set into the sides of the vault, allegedly depicting the twelve disciples but in all likelihood serving as an allegory for the solar zodiac. The figures hold what appear to be implements of torture, the implements of their martyrdom as some guide books would have us believe. On closer inspection however these tools are revealed to have a decidedly Masonic flavour, hinting at a hidden purpose.

As above, so below: Two of the 'twelve disciples'

The custom of adorning the final resting place of temporal monarchs with the houses of the Zodiac can be traced back to ancient Egypt and beyond. Tombs dating to around 3000 BC have been found to contain some very curious magical implements or 'chessboards'. On these boards there is room only for the pieces themselves – none for moving them. There are always either 7 or 13 pieces arrayed along each side of the board and, more significantly, the pieces themselves are always in he shape of crescent moons. Osiris, to whose cult these mysterious objects belonged, was a 'horned God' and his sister, Isis (or possibly his mother according to Robert Graves ) was a 'horned Goddess'. The American researcher James Vogh speculated that a lunar zodiac of thirteen houses may have existed long before the familiar solar zodiac came into common usage. He believed that the thirteenth sign may have been Arachne, the Cretan spider goddess.

One of the major pieces of evidence to support this notion is a lunar zodiac found in a mosaic (see above) at the Jewish gnostic synagogue of Beth Alpha in Israel's Jezreel Valley. It is clear that this has been altered from an original 13 house to a 12 house zodiac. In the centre of the wheel crouches a spider-like figure, arachne, with 13 items in her headdress and the crescent Moon on her left shoulder. In all likelihood the twelve disciples surrounding Christ were another representation of this zodiac just as King Arthur was said to sit at a round table surrounded by his 12 most favoured nights. In Scandinavian mythology the story of the death of Balder, the most loved of the gods, tells of how a banquet was held in Valhalla to which 12 of the gods were invited. While the feast was in progress Loki, the spirit of strife and mischief, who was not invited, turned up regardless as the thirteenth guest. He gave blind Hoder an arrow of mistletoe, tricking him into shooting and killing Balder. In the Saxon version of the story Balder is resurrected and the golden age of mankind begins.

The original story of the Sleeping Beauty follows an identical outline with 12 good faeries invited to the christening of the King's daughter. Each bestows a blessing on the child but a thirteenth evil faery, who has not been invited, appears, cursing the child with death should she ever prick her finger. Despite all precautions, she does, falling into a deep sleep. Around her the castle and it's lands also fall into a death like slumber until a brave knight finally finds his way to the princess's side. When he kisses her the knight revives not only the princess but the castle and the land itself.

As above, so below: Gustave Dore's masterful illustrations for Perrault's 'Sleeping Beauty'

The parallels in these stories are obvious. In each of them, the best beloved is killed by the most evil or weakest member of the group of 13 and desolation follows. Then the beloved one returns to life and all is well once more. Clearly then, these tales, like the enigmatic lunar counters of the Egyptian 'chessboards' and the figures that adorn the vault of Duke Francis and Duchess Marguerite, are all metaphorical representations of the cycle of the year. They tell the familiar tale of the Sun who is slain each year by the Moon only to be resurrected to bring another golden summer. The lunar year contains only twelve and a half complete cycles of the Moon. The thirteen lunar month is therefore short and 'weak'. It is in this 'weak' month that the sun 'dies'

The four guardians of the vault, the four 'virtues' demand far deeper study....

We took a step back to face Justice and were absolutely blown away by her presence. This Justice is certainly not blind, in fact she wears no veil at all and it is as if nothing escapes her gaze. There is something in her expression that is so life like and challenging and yet so knowing. The perfect representation of a warrior goddess as she stood before us with her solar sword pointed up toward the heavens.

Before Miss Scarlett could stop herself she reached over the fence to touch the nine-rayed sun that appears on the center of Justice's sword like a protective talisman, cutting herself on one of the sharp spikes of the protective fence . She didn't cry out and didn't seem to really notice that she had hurt herself. It seemed somehow right to spill a little blood in the presence of this virtue as blood is what binds us through the worlds, the blood of mortals, the blood of kings, the blood of gods and angels, the only thing that truly has the strength to resonate against the void, to give life to the unmanifest, to beat back the darkness that threatens hour by hour to devour us.

In 'Dwellings of the Philosopher's', Fulcanelli compares Colombe's image of Justice to the goddess Minerva and says that she must be regarded as the divine and creative thought, materialized in all nature, latent in ourselves as it is in everything that surrounds us. She is the veil of philosophy in which we can wrap ourselves. In her second form as Philosophy she “confers on those who espouse it a great power of investigation.” She enables penetration of the intimate construction of things which she cuts short as with her sword, discovering in it the presence of the spiritus mundi, of which the classical masters speak, and which has its center in the sun and draws its virtue and motion from the radiation of the heavenly body. She also gives knowledge of the general laws, rules, rhythms, and measures observed by nature in the elaboration, evolution, and perfection of created things (the scales). She finally establishes the possibility of acquiring sciences based on observation, meditation, faith, and written teachings (the book). By the same attributes, this image of Philosophy also teaches us the essential points of the labor of the Adepts and proclaims the necessity for manual labor imposed on seekers desiring to acquire the Great Work and the indisputable proof of its reality. Without technical research, without frequent attempts and reiterated experiments we can only go astray in a science whose best treatises carefully hide the physical principles, their application, the materials, and the time required. According to the master alchemist: “...whoever dares to claim to be a philosopher and does not want to labor for fear of cold, fatigue or the expense, must be regarded as the most vain of ignoramuses, or the most shameless of imposters.”

As we worked our way around the vault we were unprepared for the beauty of Strength. She is exquisitely, delicately feminine, with intricately laced flowers that cover the breasts on her armour. Her head is adorned with a conch shell like helmet with the nose of a lion on top. The braids of her hair, so reminiscent of those three enigmatic braids worn by the fair Esclarmonde de Foix, the so-called 'white lady' of Montsegur, would seem to be hieroglyphs for solar radiation, indicating that the Great Work, subjected to the influence of the heavenly body, cannot be performed without the dynamic collaboration of the sun. The braid ( in Greek seira) is adopted to represent the vibrational energy, because, among the ancient Hellenic people, the sun was called seir.

The midsection of this guardian fascinated us with her fish scales reminiscent of a mermaid that lead into a wavelike flower radiating from her belly button, surrounded by a solar symbol. The mermaid is frequently used in hermetic symbolism to characterize the union of the nascent sulphur ( the fish ) with common ( or virgin ) mercury in the philosophical mercury or 'salt of wisdom'. According to Fulcanelli the image of the mermaid may also allude to the alchemical 'Twelfth Night cake', to which the Greeks gave the same name as to the Moon, Selena (selene). This word, formed from the Greek roots (selas), brightness, and (ele), solar light, was chosen by the initiates to show that the philosophical mercury draws its brightness from sulphur just as the moon receives its light from the sun. An analogous reason caused the name siren (seiren), to be attributed to the mythical monster resulting from the combination of a woman and a fish; serein, a contraction of (seir), sun and (mene), moon, also indicates the mercurial lunar matter combined with the sulphurous solar substance. Therefore it is a translation identical to that of the Twelfth Night cake, adorned with the sign of light and spirituality: the cross, evidence of the real incarnation of the solar ray, emanating from the universal father, into heavy matter, matrix of all things, and the terra inanis et vacua (worthless and empty earth) of the Scriptures.

In her left hand the figure of Strength holds a tower, which is cracking from the force of the dragon that she is pulling out and throttling with her right hand. As Fulcanelli puts it in his usual inimitable way: ' Nothing, it can be seen, could better fit the figurative expression of the stone of the philosophers, a dragon enclosed in its fortress, the extraction of which has always been considered a true feat of strength. On the other hand, the image is revealing; for, while we experience some difficulties understanding how a robust and bulky dragon could have resisted the compression exerted by the walls of its narrow prison, we can no more grasp by what miracle it goes entirely through a mere crack in the masonry. Here again we can recognize a translation of the prodigious, the supernatural and the miraculous. .” It is the master alchemist's second suggestion however that we like the best. The tower of strength according to Rabelais, “and that a feat of strength requires courage, wisdom, and power: courage because there is danger, wisdom because due knowledge is necessarily required; power, for whoever cannot do it, should not undertake it.” Always the dire warnings from the Masters. No one ever said that this was an easy school and pulling that winged dragon out of that little crack is not all that different from childbirth or the miraculous strength it takes for the birth of creation itself.

"Wearing a matron headdress with a throat collar" Michel Colombe’s third guardian, the virtue Temperance, according to Dubuisson-Aubenay's Itinerary in Brittany, written in 1636, “...is dressed in simple clothes, a bridle with bit in one hand and in the other, the pendulum of a clock or the balance wheel of a watch..". In her left hand the statue holds a case decorated with a weight-driven clock, a customary model of the 16th century, seemingly a hieroglyph for time itself, the sole master of wisdom - and, like the hourglass, an emblem of Saturn. According to Fulcanelli however the esoteric scope of Temperance lies entirely in the bridle which she holds in her right hand. “...It is with the bridle that the horse is driven; by means of this bit, the cavalier directs his mount as he pleases. So the bridle can be considered as the essential instrument, the mediator placed between the will of the cavalier and the progress of the horse, toward the proposed objective. This means is designated in hermeticism by the name of cabala. So that the special expression of the bridle, that of restraint and of direction, allow one to identify and recognize, under a single symbolic form, Temperance and the Cabalistic Science...”

Both Fulcanelli and wikipedia make an interesting, indeed crucial, distinction between the hermetic cabala and the Hebraic Kabbala insisting that the two terms have nothing in common, save their pronunciation. “...The Hebrew Kabbala is only concerned with the Bible; it is therefore strictly limited to sacred exegesis and hermeneutics. Hermetic cabala concerns books, texts and documents of the esoteric sciences of Antiquity, of the Middle Ages and of modern times. While the Hebraic kabbala is but a process based on the decomposition and explanation of each word or letter, the hermetic cabala on the contrary is a genuine language. And as the great majority of didactic treatises of ancient sciences are written in cabala or as they use this language in their essential passages; as the Great Art itselff, on Artephius’ own confession, is completely cabalistic, the reader cannot understand any of it if he does not possess at least the first elements of the secret idiom..”.

In the words of the master alchemist the hermetic cabala is “...a precious key allowing whoever possesses it to open the doors of the sanctuaries, of these closed books which are the works of traditional science, to extract their spirit, to see their secret meaning...” Allegedly known to Jesus and his apostles the cabala was used in the Middle Ages by philosophers, scientists, men of letters, and diplomats. Knights belonging to Orders and knights-errant, troubadours, trouveres, and minstrels, travelling students of the famous school of magic at Salamanca, “...whom we call Venusbergs because they were said to come from the mountain of Venus and discussed among themselves in the language of the gods...”

The Latin word Caballus and the Greek word kaballes both mean pack-horse but here the pack referred to would seem to be the sum total of ancient knowledge and medieval chivalry, the heavy baggage of esoteric truth transmitted down through the ages. Any language is capable of conveying this hidden message or becoming cabalistic through double meanings. We detect it's echoes in the works of great initiates such as Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Plato, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe and Swift , in the myth cycle of the Round Table and of the Grail; in the works of Francois Rabelais and Cyrano de Bergerac, in Perrault's Tales of Mother Goose and Thibault de Champagne's Songs of the King of Navarre. According to Fulcanelli “...The cabala and symbolism use different paths to reach the same goal and merge into the same teaching. They are the two master pillars erected on the corner stones of the philosophical foundation that support the alchemical temple of wisdom.”

The last of the virtues was the most simple, humble and perfect of them all. Prudence stands tranquilly peering into her looking glass. Anne de Bretagne seems to have deliberately chosen this aspect to bear her own countenance, her composed features staring placidly into a mirror of stone. Only on closer inspection does this guardian's most startling aspect become readily apparent. The figure is double faced...

As above, so below: The two faces of Prudence, symbolizing nature in all her aspects and the final stage of the alchemical process in which opposites combine to produce the Rebis, the perfect, androgynous being

On the back of Anne's head appears the carving of a bearded old man, bringing to mind the god Janus, he of beginnings, endings and doorways into the Otherworld, a subtle play perhaps on both the dual nature of the Duchess and on two worlds existing side by side, 'on reality' and it's shadow, the perfect combination of masculine and feminine principles, of the sun and the Moon, the exoteric outer realm of surface appearances and the inner world of hermetic truth. Of all the images we had seen in this place this curious, hieratic figure seemed to come the closest to embodying the true nature of magic, of encapsulating the subtle dualities of the Western esoteric tradition. It seems entirely appropriate that Anne would lend her own face to Prudence, making her effectively the 'first and last and always.'

At the base of the statue her foot is crushing a viper, which is in the throes of a death spasm, signifying her will to crush the heads of her enemies while preparing for the chemical wedding. Her mirror too carries a complex double meaning which is far cry from vanity. It could be the representation of Yesod, reflecting the cabbalistic world, the mask of the moon. The master alchemist himself thought her mirror was an image of “Truth which was always considered by the classical authors as the hieroglyph for the universal matter, and in particular was recognized among them as a sign of the very substance of the Great Work. Subject of the Sages, Mirror of the Art are hermetic synonyms which veil from common men the true name of the secret mineral. It is in this mirror, say the masters, that man can see nature unveiled. Thanks to this mirror, he can know the ancient truth in its traditional realism. For nature never shows herself to the seeker, but only through the intermediary of this mirror which holds its reflected image.”

In her left hand the figure of Prudence holds a compass which is a tool used for measurements whose significance we need not explain to all you fellow brothers out there. To be brief it is an instrument in which one can complete the perfect circle, an allegory for the beginning and the ending, whose proportions are only known to Nature herself. In the system of the Jewish Kabbala this perfect balance is elegantly expressed in these passages from the Lesser Holy Assembly; “When the Bride is united to the King in the excellence of the Sabbath, then are all things made one body... the beauty of the female is completed by the beauty of the male... When the Mother is united to the King, the worlds receive a blessing and are found in the joy of the universe.”

It is easy to see from whence the brilliant hermetic artist, Jean Perreal, may have gathered the inspiration for the four cardinal virtues. Once again the Tarot provides the key to help us unlock the possible source for this masterpiece in a set of Italian 'educational' prints or cards made around 1465 and known as the Tarrochi of Mantegna.

The identity of their creator is lost to us now and their original intended purpose, possibly as a tool of mystical instruction rather than an instrument of divination, must perforce remain a mystery. Monsieur Perreal travelled and worked extensively in Italy so that he would almost certainly have come into contact with these images. After years of painting royal portraits one of the last things that he ever painted was an allegorical image, curiously titled 'The Lament of Nature to the Wandering Alchemist'.

( iv ) Coda - extracting the heart

After fourteen unsuccessful pregnancies Anne of Brittany's third marriage succeeded in producing two female heirs – Claude, whose congenital deformity did not prevent her from becoming Queen consort to Francis 1 and Renee who was to become the Duchess of Chartres. In 1554 Renee was accused of heresy and forced to recant on pain of losing her lands, titles and possessions.

Anne herself failed to survive the winter of 1513-14, succumbing to a kidney-stone attack at the Château of Blois. She was interred in the necropolis of Saint Denis following a funeral of exceptional length, lasting a full 40 days and inspiring all future French royal funerals.

According to her will Anne's heart was placed in an enamel gold reliquary designed by Jean Perreal before being borne back to Nantes where it was deposited in the vault she had constructed for her parents. Following the revolution the reliquary was exhumed by order of the National Convention and seized as part of a collection of precious metals pertaining to churches. It was kept in the National Library instead of being melted down however and was later returned to Nantes where it is currently on display in the Musée Dobrée.

“...In the cathedral at Nantes, the evening twilight gradually declines. The shadows invade the ogival vaults, fill the nave, and bathe the petrified humanity of the majestic edifice. On our sides, the powerful and solemn columns climb toward the intricate arches, the transepts and pendentives which the increasing darkness now steals from our eyes. A bell is ringing. An invisible priest in a subdued voice recited the evening prayers, and the knell from above answers the prayer from below. Only the peaceful flames of the tapers spot with golden brightness the darkness of the sanctuary. Then once the mass is done, a sepulchral silence hands over all these inert and cold things, witnesses to a distant past, pregnant with mystery and the unknown...” - Fulcanelli

The Mother of Toads

2011-09-14T09:20:00.000-07:00

For a number of years now I have been planning to return to the chair as a director of genre cinema. Since relocating my headquarters to the isolated Cathar enclave of Montsegur in the French Pyrenees I have dreamed of capturing this magical world on camera and bringing the technological expertise of 21^st century film making to bear on the wealth of local mythology that colours our day to day lives here in the Zone.

I could never have guessed quite how swiftly those dreams would be realized...

( 1 ) Morrocco – March 2010

Miss Scarlett and myself had flown south to the whispering sands of the wide Sahara to escape the worst of the European winter. After a series of misadventures we found ourselves in Fez, holed up in a vast, abandonned Moorish mansion while a fierce storm closed in on the ancient, mud walled medina. As the wind grew steadily stronger, howling and worrying at the shutters we withdrew deeper into the rambling, tenebrous household. We kindled candles and flambeaux, creating a warm, inner sanctum in the eye of the storm and bade our fixer, a handsome, wily youth who went by the name of 'Skilful', not to admit any visitors other than those hands required to keep up the steady flow of subtly spiced Morroccan dishes and sugared dainties required to refresh, replenish and reinspire us as we set about our latest writing project.

We had recently purchased a glow in the dark ouja board and swiftly made contact with a disincarnate entity that claimed to be my guardian daemon, Moag – my invisible playmate and boon companion since childhood. In point of fact I don't normally place much store in 'channelling' but we had time on our hands and I was game for a laugh. After exchanging a few questions to establish that the daemon was indeed who he claimed to be we turned to the matter at hand, asking his advice on which project to focus on. We had been toying with several ideas for new screenplays all of which the daemon promptly rejected out of hand. Much to my surprise Moag asked us instead if we were familiar with a short story by Clark Ashton Smith entitled 'The Mother of Toads.'

Above: The daemon Moag

I had read plenty of weird fiction in my time but this obscure yarn had hitherto escaped my attention. 'The Mother of Toads' ( henceforth referred to as 'M.O.T' for expediency's sake ) first appeared in 'Weird Tales' in July 1938 and having long since passed into the public domain is now widely available to casual readers over the internet. ( http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/143/mother-of-toads ) This cruel, erotic fable, running to little more than three pages, is set in medieval France in Smith's fictional woodland kingdom of Averoigne and concerns a young apothecary's apprentice who falls under the seductive spell of a venomous shape shifting witch named Mere Antoinette. Our disincarnate advisor was adamant that rather than mounting a direct adaptation we should use the original tale as the the jumping off point for a modern day homage to both Smith and the immortal H.P. Lovecraft, issuing us with a series of very direct instructions as to how to go about writing the screenplay.

The daemon insisted that the new scenario should open with two American tourists, a young anthropology student named Martin and his leggy girlfriend Karina, buying a pair of eldritch earrings in the market place at Mirepoix. Having moved with the times Smith's titular sorceress now suppliments her income by selling bizarre hand crafted jewellery based on designs drawn directly from the 'Necronomicon', Lovecraft's mythical grande grimoire. Intrigued by her claim that the book not only really exists but has been handed down through Mere Antoinette's family for untold generations Martin visits her cottage, setting in motion a series of events that ultimately places both him and his partner in mortal jeopardy.

The finished screenplay ran to roughly fifteen pages intended to evoke of the pulp fiction and EC and Warren comics of my youth, specifically the work of 'Ghastly' Graham Ingels and Berni Wrightson as viewed through the distorted visual aesthetic of those masters of European gothic cinema – Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. In short the finished piece was a sort of love letter to the genre that had nourished my creative roots but quite how we would go about realizing the beast remained a mystery to us at the time of writing.

( ii ) Occitania – May 2010

On our return to Europe we recruited the aid of our friend Emilio Ranzani(above) whose similarly Lovecraftian short 'Langliena' had been attracting good notices on the festival circuit. Emiliano further honed what we had come up with in Fez, adding baroque curlicues to the gore scenes and enthusiatically encouraging us to take the whole, beserk endevour to the next logical level. Initially we had intended to shoot the thing in our own back yard using available materials, being well aware that finding funds or any form of distribution for a short subject of this nature would, under any sane or normal circumstances, be highly unlikely if not downright impossible. What we hadn't reckoned on, of course, was that this particular short was demonaically inspired and hence apparently exempt from the normal dreary rules of cause and effect.

Within 24 hours of finishing the screenplay we heard that David Gregory at Severin Films ( who had recently distributed my earlier flick 'HARDWARE' on DVD in the States ) was preparing a new anthology film entitled 'THE THEATRE BIZARRE' based on Oscar Méténier's Le Theatre du Grand Guignol ( literally the 'Theatre of the Big Puppet' ) which was founded in 1897 in an old chapel in the Pigalle area of Paris with the intention of producing graphic, naturalistic horror shows, a form of provocative amoral entertainment, literally the forerunner of today's splatter films. We figured that 'M.O.T' might well fit the bill and sent David a copy of the script. His enthusiastic response caught us off guard. I was used to people passing on my material, usually without even bothering to read it. By contrast the speed with which the pieces fell into place on 'M.O.T' proved rather bracing. David was at the Cannes film festival so Miss Scarlett and myself bundled into the Shadow Theatre interceptor and high tailed it down to Montpellier where we rendezvoused at the railway station to clinch the deal. And so, without further ado, the project slid effortlessly into preproduction.

David had put together an impressive roster of directorial talent with Tom Savini, Buddy Giovinazzo, Doug Buck, Karim Hussain and Jeremy Kasten lined up to shoot the other segments and the linking scenes that would ultimately feature Udo Kier as the show's beserk automaton M.C. We knew the budget wouldn't be able to stretch to much more than a five day shooting schedule and would require a huge amount of unpaid elbow grease but the challenge was irresistible. We hoped we might supliment our meager funds by getting the Pyrenean Film Commission on side and would have to find a French production company to hold the pieces together and assemble the key personnel.

Doug and Karim had previously dealings with a young producer named Fabrice Lambot whose production company Metaluna films was based in Paris. After some preliminary negotiation by cell and e-mail Fabrice agreed to hop a flight to Toulouse and rendezvous with us to tour the locations before drawing up a final budget and schedule for submission to the film commission. Of course that meant a suitable location would have to be found for him to tour.

As above, so below: The Metarie Blanche

The derelect stone building known as the 'Metarie Blanche' that squats astride a densely wooded hill near La Serpent had always been at the back of my mind as a potential location for the witch's cottage in 'M.O.T'. The house had a curious history, having been built some forty years ago by one of our friends, Celia Brooke, the flamboyant grand daughter of Sultan Brooke, the white rajah of Sarawak. ( pictured below with myself and a portrait of her illustrious grand father )

Celia and her husband, the leader of the international Sufi Movement, had purchased the property after a man she described as 'Hitler's clairvoyant' had accurately described it to her following a chance meeting at a party in swinging 70's London. The ageing German psychic had prophecied that she would one day find treasure there but after Celia and her first husband went their separate ways the property had fallen into disrepair. Celia moved out of the Metairie following a traumatic series of events in the early nineties ( * detailed in my previous blog – 'The Immortal's Feast' http://shadowtheatre13.com/thethreemothers18.html ) and the building's most recent tenant, the Sufi sheik, dolphin communication and zero point energy expert, the enigmatic Dr. Adam Truimbul had since upped stakes and relocated to Hawai. After several decades of legal manouevering the issue of who actually owned the property remained crucially unclear.

The Metairie's melancholic, gothic ambience was further enhanced by its location, a stone's throw from Rennes les Château and what our sorcerer friend, Uranie the hermit of the River of Colours, believed to be one of the seven dreaded gateways to Hell, the perfect setting for 'M.O.T's twisted tale of gloom and perdition. As long term followers of this blog are doubtless already aware Uranie is not only an accomplished geomancer but a huge fan of the genre, possessed of an encyclopaedic knowlege of early 80's Spaghetti horror. In fact I half suspected Uranie of having used his sorcerous powers to help bring the production together.

Among the installation art and Voodoo shrines surrounding his cottage I had come across subtly modified box covers for Lucio Fulci's 'Gates of Hell' and the 'The Beyond', a film whose plot hinged around another one of Clark Ashton Smith's creations, a black tome of eldritch lore referred to as the 'Book of Eibon'. Uranie claimed he had pinned the box covers to his fence in an effort to warn casual bypassers of their proximity to the infernal portal although I couldn't help but feel he had left them out as bait.

We had come across a copy of my earlier film 'Dust Devil' inside a box cover for Charle's Band's 'Tourist Trap' and noticed a unused ticket for Karim Hussain's 'La Belle Bette' ( 'The Beautiful Beast' - 2006 ) among the other mondo bizarro souvenirs propped on Uranie's mantelpiece. ( * see 'The Mark of the Beast' http://terraumbra13.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html ) Karim had already volunteered to serve as 'M.O.T's director of phorography and regardless of whether or not some form of spaghetti voodoo was at work it seemed to make perfect sense to cold call the star of 'The Beyond', Catriona McColl, and ask her if she were willing to essay the pivotal rôle of Mere Antoinette, the dreaded mother of toads herself.

As above, so below: The Recce - Assistant director Lauri Loytokoski, Richard and Karim Hussain

( iv ) Extracts from the weblog of Scarlett Amaris

La Serpent – July 2010

It was nearing dusk when we made it up to what is left of the Metarie Blanche. Celia wandered around showing us where different gardens had once been planted and I got the sense of how much love and hard work had gone into building the place. It all seemed so far away now as we seated ourselves on the hillside to share a bottle of white wine. The rest of the crew still buzzed around the property, taking pictures and measurements and I was watching with one expectant eye as Richard took a phone call from Catriona MacColl. He paced back and forth at the top of the ridge. I could catch a word here and there, enough to tell that all was going well. Then I heard a car drive up and some kind of loud ruckus going on where we had parked the vehicles. Celia and I watched as a couple got out with an evil looking doberman snarling and straining at its leash as it's masters shouted for everyone to get off the property. “It's my property,” Celia was watching indifferently, “Don't get up.” We watched for a couple of minutes and it was clear that the situation was escalating. “We're going to have to do something.” I said casually as I took another sip of wine. “I know, dear, but these situations are always so boring...” Celia started to rise and I followed closely behind her. She opened out her arms dramatically wide as she neared the raised voices, “I'm Celia. How may I help you? Welcome to my house...” If looks could kill then Celia would have been a cinder, but I her grandiose entrance seemed to shock the screaming couple into submission. Everyone looked a little taken aback as phone numbers were quickly exchanged and the couple got in their car with the dog and burned rubber down the gravel road.

“Do you think it was something that I said?” Celia gave me a knowing half-smile. “We left that half drunk bottle back on the ridge...”

“Say no more” And we wandered back in the midst of the confusion to finish it off. Richard had been on the phone the entire time trying to shield out the screaming match. He looked half-pleased and utterly terrified at the same time as he walked over to the rest of the group where everyone was worked up into a tail spin. The story of who really owned that property will never be figured out, so many deals and double deals, forged papers, etc. Somehow I knew that we would get the place as a location and another part of me just wanted to leave it alone. That beautiful place had caused so much misery already. We packed everyone back into the cars and headed back to Rennes. “Just like Rennes” I thought, “nothing is ever a straight shot, nothing is ever straight forward.” We bid goodbye to Celia who told us not to worry about 'those nasty people', she would make sure that everything worked out.

Next stop was Uranie's cottage to tell him what was going on and to talk over some of the symbols that we might need for the shoot if we ended up using the Metarie Blanche. Uranie looked wide eyed when we told him what had happened and said that the place had 'a very bad past.” Then he consulted a pantheon of different esoteric charts and decided the day and time that would be best to have him come and bless the house. He didn't feel that it would be safe to shoot there otherwise and I had to agree with him. There was a sadness and a malevolence that seemed somehow cemeted into the very fabric that was still holding up those walls.

There was no time to ponder these thoughts as our friend Alain, the dancing faun, came singing up the road. Alain has the most amazing ability to just show up, like he knows exactly where everyone is the moment that they step onto the plateau. He took an immediate shine to our producer Fabrice and while trying to concentrate on the different sigils that Uranie was explaining to me, I could hear Alain exuberantly telling Fabrice about the four different portals to the other world that existed in the area. 'One in Bezu, one in Bugarach, one in Rennes and one in Montsegur'. He took Fabrice outside to show him the four directions of the portals and having just met Fabrice and him just meeting us, I thought it might be a little much to take onboard. But, hey, it's the Zone and it's got a high weirdness factor. Better to have it all out in the open. Uranie, Richard and I finished up a magical plan of attack and went outside where Fabrice and Alain were having a friendly, animated discussion. As we walked back towards the car Fabrice was shaking his head, “that guy is amazing. You should definitely interview him. You wouldn't believe the things he had to say...” We both smiled having heard Alain's speil before and partly in relief that Fabrice was taking it all in stride. Things looked good for MOT. Catriona MacColl was on board, the resident sorcerer Uranie was on the case and it felt like all the pieces were starting to fall into place.

Above: Richard with MOT producer Fabrice Lambot at La Serpent

Approximately a week later we returned to the Metairie to meet with Dr. Truimbul's partner and close the deal. Nancy was one of the strangest looking women that I had ever seen. Obviously American and dressed in a high end, sporty kind of way, her face was so perfectly smooth that it was impossible to tell her age and she just looked perpetually surprised. I'm not sure that those heavily botoxed muscles even functioned anymore. Her handlers hovered about her, seemingly terrified that she was talking with us and yet afraid of her at the same time. Richard told her the whole synposis of Mother of Toads and what we were planning on shooting in the house. She listened attentively although there was no way to read if anything registered with her. At the end she blinked and then started outside as we followed her. She turned to face us both, “Mere Anoinette should drink green drinks.'

I was utterly confused. “You mean like energy drinks?” I ventured.

“Green drinks with flies.” she answered.

“Ohh...” we both laughed, “that could be a very fun idea.”

“Yes, it could be. But people do eat flies. I had a friend once who grew his own flies that he ate for protein.”

“Did he live around here?” I couldn't help but ask.

“No. He lived underground. He was an alien, but he's dead now which is probably a good thing.” Rarely are we silenced but neither of us could figure out what to say to her. She went on like we were all the best of friends. “We're going to dinner after this with some friends at the bottom of the road. Real peasants, real salt of the earth people. Their mother goes wandering from time to time. A couple of times they've found her up here. But now they tie her to a chair at night so she doesn't get out as much.” I had to close my jaw that had hit the ground and without missing a beat, Nancy walked over to the stone bench and sat down on it. “Have you sat on this bench yet?” She asked Richard without waiting for an answer. “You should make sure that it is in your movie.” “Why?” asked Richard. “Did something special happen here?” For a second I saw an actual emotion try to pass across her face, but I'll be damned if I know what it was. “It's a secret...” she giggled and then wandered off to her handlers. End of interview and so typically Rennes.

We started whispering as soon as she was out of ear shot.

“Did she really say that the 'peasants' down the road tie their mother to a chair?”

“Yes.”

“And her fly eating friend was an alien?”

“Yes. Like I told you the rich are different.”

“That would be an understatement...”

As above, so below: Mother of Toads concept art by Ivan de Castries

( v ) Extracts from Richard Stanley's journal

Montsegur – Morenci – Mirepoix – October 2010

The period leading up to the commencement of principal photography on ' M.O.T' was a strange and arduous one. The principal toad monster was designed and redesigned as we struggled to find a way of achieving the beast on the funds and materials available and Karim scuffled to pull together an effective camera and lighting package. At length it was decided to bring in a top of the range Sony Red Mysterium X from Belgium for the principal photography while Emiliano would take care of the second unit photography using a Canon 5D.

Above: Mother of Toads D.P. Karim Hussain with friend

The highly professional crew, approximately 35 people in all, were assembled out of Paris and Toulouse and housed at Madame Couquet's auberge in Montsegur while the principal cast, rounded out by an easy going young Texan named Shane Woodward in the rôle of the doomed anthropolgy student and Argentinian soap opera star Victorian Maurette as his girlfriend Karina were billeted in a hotel in the neighbouring village. Coming up with the army of gigantic toads called for by our somewhat gonzo screenplay proved to be a rather more difficult matter.

As above, so below: Storyboard images by yours truly for 'The Mother of Toads'

It was perilously late in the season and we had been forced to pull the dates of the shoot to accommodate the toad's life cycle in the hope of completing the necessary sequences before the beasts went into hibernation for the winter. By the time the first day of principal photography rolled around however we still had only one rather small and decidedly sleepy looking toad at our disposal.

As is so often the case when you try to shoot anything the weather took a turn for the worse with a ferocious storm blowing in as Day One approached. Fortunately the driving rain and coiling, etherial mist that shrouded the treetops played in our favor, enhancing the sepulchral ambience and bringing out the toads in force.

We rode out the worst of the tempest by shooting the spa scenes with Victoria Maurette up front, knowing full well that all the rain in the world wouldn't matter one jot so long as we were safely shooting indoors or underwater in a heated swimming pool.

As above, so below: Scenes from the shoot - Shane Woodward and Victoria Maurette go eyeball to eyeball with the Morenci cross.

The Morenci cross scenes on the morning of Day Two proved a little more problematic and we all came away with damp socks although judicious framing and post-production magic managed to successfully disguise the fact that the entire crossroads sequence had been lensed in the pouring rain.

Above: Karim shoulders the camera for a 'toad vision' shot at the Morenci cross

After completing our work at Morenci we repaired to Mirepoix where we managed to complete the scene in which the young leads buy the earrings from Mere Antoinette in a covered section of the market. Other than a weird, random encounter with a self-proclaimed 'psychic' who spotted us shooting and butted in to make a series of strident prophecies things went pretty much according to plan with the crew working smoothly together despite the language barrier and Catriona effortlessly stealing the show with her portrayal of Mere Antoinette. She had taken the opportunity to observe Madame Couquet's mannerisms during rehearsal and had picked up a tune she had heard her humming as she built the fire at the auberge the day before, a tune Catriona now repeated to suitably eerie effect in an improvised moment at the end of the scene.

By nightfall the rain had begun to slacken off and I started to believe that we might be able get this beast safely in the can after all.

( vi ) Montsegur – Day Three

'I like metal', muttered Eric the toad wrangler.

'Yeah...uhm...I'm sure you do.' Karim nodded, doing his best to humour him. Eric was one of our neighbours, a fellow Montsegurian with a penchant for collecting reptiles, spiders and amphibious critters of varying descriptions but right now he was four sheets to the wind which made his rambling monologue somewhat harder to follow than usual.

'I like to kill with metal.'

'Pardon?'

'I hunt pigs for my dogs. I like to kill pigs'.

Karim nodded again, more slowly this time.

'I like to bathe in the blood of the pigs. I bathe in the blood of the pigs for my dogs. I love my dogs...'.

Karim turned, desperately looking to us for rescue. Eric had been hanging about our improvised production headquarters all evening but he had every right to celebrate having successfully delivered thirty more enormous Pyrenean toads that he had collected off the road after the storm. They would all be kept safe and handled literally with kid gloves on account of the psychedelic toxins secreted by their skin, before being turned loose after the shoot on the Montagne de la Frau ( Occitan for 'Mountain of Fear' ) on the other side of the river.

Toads have been associated with witchcraft in this part of the world since time out of mind, viewed in popular mythology as familiars or intermediaries between mankind and the 'otherworld' of faeries, elves and woodland elementals. Consequently it was of the utmost importance that the critters be treated with the care and respect. If the spirits of this place were to turn against us we wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of completing the remaining scenes on schedule, certainly not without the benefit of a weather cover set or any other form of insurance. Right now we were flying without a safety net and needed all the luck we could get.

'That man's a lunatic!' whispered Karim as soon as Eric was out of earshot.

'I know.' Miss Scarlett smiled. 'He says those sort of things all the time.'

'But you don't understand! How can you be so relaxed about letting him into your house? I mean he's quite obviously a psychopath!'

' I guess you could put it that way' I watched as Miss Scarlett and Emiliano gently loaded the toads into the tanks that would serve as their temporary habitats. 'But right now we need him'

As above, so below: Could this be a major milestone in toad cinema?

Our schedule had gone into nights, shooting for two consecutive evenings in the woods at the base of the 'Mountain of Fear'. The Pyrenean Film Comission had sent a camera crew down from Toulouse to document the shoot and Fabrice was walking on eggs, trying to make certain that all concerned were on their best behaviour. Most of the crew had been instructed not to talk to the Toulousians for fear they might get wind of some of the more outlandish aspects of the production.

I had prepared a piece to deliver on camera about how we were trying to create work opportunities for the locals and attract international investment to the area and had just finished my spiel without a hitch when Uranie showed up. He had driven over from Rennes les Château to watch the scenes with the toad monster which would be shot later that night and was dressed to the nines in a white frock and flamboyant eye make up. I winced as the Toulousian crew took an instant interest in him. Rising to the occassion Uranie fixed the televsion camera with his gaze as the generator whirred into life behind him. Karim's lights turned the woods into a shifting, phantasmal maze of light and shadow while Uranie launched into an animated address concerning the mythical 'white lady' of Montsegur, Esclarmonde de Foix, the castle's immortal chatelaine and the various other spirits that inhabitted the place, insisting that it was possible to capture the images of these disincarnate entities on film if you knew where to look for them. Deliberately turning a deaf ear I pretended to busy myself with setting up the next shot, leaving Fabrice to deal with the situation.

Above: Victoria Maurette in jeopardy. Below: Shane Woodward makes a shocking discovery.

It was a long, strange night and we were racing against the clock but we aquitted ourselves as well as could be expected and the mountain allowed us to get away with it, only raining on us a little during the lunch break. I know this place like the back of my hand, well enough to be fully aware that if the weather had turned on us it could have closed us down in seconds but remarkably the mountain's unseen guardians seemed to be strangely tolerant of our efforts.

As above, so below: Shane Woodward and Victoria Maurette meet the Mother of Toads

At the end of the evening the Toulousian camera crew came to say goodbye and I realized my earlier fears had been unfounded. Thanking me for allowing them to sit in on the shoot their director told me 'I named my daughter Esclarmonde'. Placing his palms together before him he bowed and his crew did likewise before turning and starting back towards their car. Perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise to learn that the good folk from the Film Commission were Cathars – or at least Cathar sympathizers – but it explained a lot, namely why they had bothered backing our efforts to begin with.

Above: Scarlett Amaris on location in the 'otherworld'.

Extracts from the weblog of Scarlett Amaris – October 2010

By the end of the night I was feeling none too well after inadvertently absorbing a liberal amount of toad venom from doing the closeups with Emiliano and Laurie, even though we had all carefully worn gloves. Emiliano had managed to get it in his eyes and was looking kind of sorry. The toads, of course, were the stars of the show and when they were all done, we walked them up to the base of the mountain and set them free. They were none the worse for wear and even hung around for a minute or two before taking off into the underbrush.

I was still sick and Richard was exhausted by the time we made it back to the house. Then I found a 12 inch worm sitting in a plastic bag on the kitchen table and I just sort of lost it.

“Lets get out of here”

We both went storming into the night, marching blindly down the winding pavement of the D-9 until suddenly we realized how far we had gone. Neither of us spoke a word as we stopped, recognizing that we were close to the neighboring village of Serre Longue. Utterly fatigued Richard lay down in the middle of the road to look at the stars and I went and sat quietly on the hillside rolling up a cigarette. Suddenly, I heard a strange crashing noise come out of the forest and then what sounded like running hooves. A dark shape came careening down the road heading straight for where Richard was lying. I thought about warning him, but then wondered if the animal really would run over him. Besides, didn't he hear it running straight at his head? At the last second the wild boar veered to the right nearly brushing him and went crashing back into the forest. Richard sat up quickly.

“What the hell was that?”I didn't have time to answer because a second huge boar had emerged from the forest on the same exact trajectory as the first. Richard froze as his eyes met the animal's, who seemed more than a little surprised, swerving at the last second and following in the footsteps of his buddy.

“I think you were nearly mowed down by a sanglier, my dear”

“Christ that was close!”

But the moment was so surreal and had such a Monty Pythoneque quality to it that the tension was broken and all we could do was laugh as we dusted ourselves off and headed back home to get some shut eye before another long day of shooting.

( vii ) La Serpent – The last days

The next morning the clouds parted and we saw the sun again. The crew's spirits rose as they relocated to their new accomodation in the tiny village of Fa, within easy striking distance of the Metarie where we were to shoot the remaining scenes.

'We've finally gone too Fa!' grinned Miss Scarlett as the interceptor barreled between the rolling, autumnal hills. The end of the shoot was in sight and like a team of horses that scents the stables the crew were pulling harder, anxious to get the film in the can and return to their lives and families back in the so-called 'real' world..

My old friend, the composer Simon Boswell ( above left ) had flown in to Carcassonne after completing work on a new musical project for the Pope, commuting from the Vatican to the heretical heart of old Occitania, literally travelling from one spiritual pole to another. He wanted to familiarize himself with the regional folk music that would form a key element in his score for 'MOT' – a rich fusion of Occitan vocals and traditional giallo motifs evocative of the late seventies/early eighties Italian gothic thrillers that we sought to emulate.

Having arranged to meet us at the house Simon picked up a car at the airport and wended his way through the narrowing back roads to La Serpent where Uranie had completed his exorcism of the building, daubing complex blood red symbols on the walls drawn from the George Hay 'hoax' Necronomicon – a book believed by many students of the dark arts ( especially here in the South!) to have been partially based on an earlier work analogous to the mythical Cathar grande grimoire known as the 'Book of the Seven Seals'.

As above: 12th century bas relief in Belpech, south of France - a disfigured inverted cross forms the centrepiece. In the right hand corner of the cross can be seen the 'seal of Eibon' familiar to fans of Clark Ashton Smith and aficionados of Lucio Fulci's 'The Beyond' - proof perhaps of the mythical grand grimoire's reality?

So below: Catriona Mac Coll, star of 'The Beyond' explains the true facts of life to Shane Woodward

A fire smouldered on the broad hearth where no fire had burned in all too many years and the interior of the building had been redressed by the art department into the murky sorceresses lair envisaged in our storyboards. Catriona, a consumate professional who had wanted to play a witch all her life effortlessly took command of the material, bringing Mere Antoinette to vivid life in a haunting performance that would seem to demand further exploration in some future extrapolation on 'M.O.T's central themes.

As we filmed the scenes in which Mere Antoinette explained the meaning of the grotesque images portrayed in the grimoire to Shane Woodward's increasingly nervous anthropologist Catriona's voice fell to a chill, sibilent whisper and there was not one of us in the room that didn't feel a shiver running down our collective spines. Shane, a younger, less experienced actor was trained in the Meisner technique hence serving as the perfect naturalistic foil for Catriona's larger than life characterization leaving me in no doubt that their scenes together at the Metairie would form the core of our story, the dramatic spine around which the other events in the short subject would revolve.

As above: Catriona Mc Coll is the Mother of Toads. So Below: I prepare to shoot my first 'love' scene in 18 years.

Shane had been extremely supportive throughout the shoot, performing above and beyond the call of duty, helping carry equipment between takes and even doing double duty as a toad wrangler during the night scenes in the forest. Now he faced his biggest challenge, stripping off for the film's central, slime laden love scene.

Our script called for Mere Antoinette to metamorphose back into her younger self after slipping a magic potion to the doomed scholar. Fabrice had succeeded in corralling one of France's most renowned porn stars, the notorious Lisa Crawford to play the rôle of the voracious succubus that enthralls and dominates Shane's hapless character. Emiliano had suggested the notion of her body secreting psychedlic toxins in a similar manner to her battrachian familiars. To this effect Miss Crawford's skin was liberally basted with a form of synthetic edible slime which poor Shane was forced to lick off on camera while his demonic seductress sat astride him, riding him like a mustang. None of us envied Shane in this supremely icky task but once again the young Texan acquitted himself admirably and the crew happily retired to their quarters for a good night's sleep before the final days shooting. To save time and avoid having to pull the set-up Miss Scarlett and myself opted to remain on set and guard the equipment as the budget had not been able to stretch to a night watchman. We endevoured to make ourselves as comfortable as possible in two arm chairs positioned beside the hearth and at length slipped into an uneasy slumber.

I vaguely recall dreaming of how the Metairie was in byegone times, before it had fallen into disrepair and awoke in the early hours of the morning, tired and stiff to find myself alone.

Above: Scarlett Amaris and Catriona Mc Coll

Extracts from the weblog of Scarlett Amaris

By this point I had gone way beyond too far, having not slept for quite a few days. I was in that twilight state between awake and dreaming sitting in the chair in front of the dying fire in the spooky and chilly Metarie Blanche. Maybe I did fall asleep for a while, but the next thing that I knew I was walking down a misty path as the sun was just breaking through the clouds. I could hear a horse neighing in the distance as my feet walked as if by rote, taking me closer to the noise.

A large white horse came trotting up out of the mists and whinnied in greeting like he had known me all of his life when he caught sight of me. I stood there scratching his muzzle and ears while he rubbed affectionately against me. “Am I dreaming?” I wondered. “Is this really happening? I don't remember there being any horses around here. This is like something out of a David Lynch movie and any second the red curtains will come down and a dwarf will start dancing backwards and. then I'll be confonted by giant rabbits and ..”

In my half concious state I wasn't sure whether what was happening was real or not, but as I turned I spied the Metarie in the distance. As if reading my confused mind the horse suddenly wheeled and galloped away. I decided to walk back to the house to awaken Richard and make him be my witness that the horse was real and that I hadn't completely lost my mind. Richard was waiting on the doorstep when I arrived wondering where I had been. “I need you to come and take a look at something for me...” The horse was there, although he was housed in a distant pasture and was now grazing obliviously, uninterested in our presence. “Whew”, I thought. A night mare or ghost horse would have been a little much on the last day of shooting.

Extracts from Richard Stanley's journal

As the crew came back on and dixie cups of luke warm coffee were passed around word began to filter back to me, via Romain Basset the first A.D, that Lisa Crawford had had a pretty bad night. After completing her scenes the evening before she had been tormented by a vivid nightmare in which she dreamed she had awoken in her hotel room to find herself menaced by a mysterious nocturnal visitant. It sounded like a classic case of what psychologists refer to as the 'old hag' or 'nocturnal sleep paralysis', a fairly common albeit extremely unpleasant hypnogogic state but Uranie took the news very seriously indeed, especially when Lisa claimed the incubus had been an individual named 'Mario'. According to our nervous unit sorceror Mario Wolf was a rival black magician who had perfected the power of astral projection and was now up to his old tricks, stealing into other people's dreams to batten on their vital energy. Our activities in the Metairie Blanche had apparently caused a tremor in the telluric web and drawn him out of hiding, forcing Uranie to take various protective measures to make certain the cast and crew were fully protected and the shoot could be completed without any further interference from the 'otherworld'.

Uranie told me that Mario drew his powers from a magic crystal named 'Arki' that had been brought over from Glastonbury to the Rennes area at the time of the Rainbow Gathering in 1998. The stone had been magically charged by various neo-Druidic prayers and sorceries before falling into Mario's hands. Since then the black magician had bent the crystal to his own evil ends, using it to capture the souls of young women that were secretly harvested while they slept. I admit I didn't pay much attention to this yarn at the time although Uranie insisted that any number of innocent people in the area had already lost their minds as a result of Mario's morbid geomantic practises. The crystal was 'out of control' he said and even Mario had begun to grow afraid of it.

Above: M.O.T - Scene 10: Take 3 the final set up

I had enough on my mind, completing the concluding scenes in which Shane's character struggles in vain to escape the eldritch enchantment woven about him. It was only later after the film was safely wrapped that I finally caught up with the rest of Uranie's story and pieced together what had really happened.

Not that I really cared at the time 'MOT' was finally in the can and all that remained was a raucous wrap party at the auberge in Fa where the cast and crew danced the night away. Personally I was feeling too dog tired to make more than a token attempt at shaking my hooves. All I could think of by then was getting safely back to Montsegur where my bed awaited me and a deep, hard earned sleep untroubled by marauding incubi.

I gave Uranie a hug, kissing him on both cheeks.Then taking off my hat I waved goodbye as the sorceror clambered into his beaten up car, Melanie, and started back towards his lonely cottage at the base of the Rennes plateau, somewhere just south of the gates of Hell.

Later I learned that Uranie and his associates had set out to break the spell by destroying 'Arki' once and for all. Somehow they managed to track down the magic crystal which Uranie told me had cracked as a result of the spiritual abuse it had suffered at Mario's hands and was audibly weeping. Uranie's friends had taken the magic stone to the summit of Mount Canigou where they had rigged up an improvised lightning conductor from a statue of Saint Michael to shatter the crystal and free the curdled souls trapped within.

After that the damaged power object apparently vanished. At least I doubt I will ever know what really became of it or the mysterious owners of that cursed house atop the hill at La Serpent. It was a pretty unlikely story by any normal standards but then there's nothing particularly normal about this neck of the woods. I'm sure there are a million other stories exactly like it drifting through the Zone. Drifting through eternity...

Above: Uranie meets the Mother of Toads

Above: From left to right: Scarlett Amaris, Richard Stanley, Doug Buck, Catriona Mc Coll, Buddy Giovinazzo and David Gregory outside the Theatre du Grande Guignol in Pigalle

'THE THEATRE BIZARRE' the anthology film in which 'THE MOTHER OF TOADS' forms the opening segment premiered at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal in July 2011 to a rapturous reception from the audience and good reviews in the trades.

http://www.dreadcentral.com/reviews/theatre-bizarre-2011

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117945697/

http://www.severin-films.com/2011/07/22/notes-from-a-fantasia-world-premiere/

http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2516229145/

'The Theatre Bizarre' will be coming soon to a number of festivals across Europe before receiving a limited theatrical release Stateside;

Sept 15th&17th Oldenburg Film Festival - Germany

Sept 16th Festival Europeen du Film Fantastique de Strasbourg, France

Sept 18th Lund International Film Festival, Sweden

October 7^th and 9^th Sitges, Spain

October 21^st Celluloid Screams, Sheffield, United Kingdom

October 22^th Mayhem Festival, Nottingham, United Kingdom

October 23rd Toronto After Dark

October 29th Lincoln Centre, New York

November 20^th Extreme Cinema, Toulouse, France

Perhaps we'll see you there...

Ghosts of the New South Africa

2011-08-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

The Karoo – summer 2011

'When I first caught sight of him through my binoculars he was standing right over there - next to that bush.' Hannes November indicated a scrubby stand of cactus on the far side of the road that ran along the base of the koppie. It looked like barely a smudge in the moonlight, hardly the sort of hiding place one might expect for a mythical demon that I had been tracking since childhood.

'What did he look like?

'He was wearing a long white coat and black trousers. He stood still with both hands behind his back whenever cars or people approached. Then he picked up a white sack and took blankets over to the bushes like he was trying to make a bed.'

'And how did you know he wasn't just an ordinary man? A vagrant looking for someplace to sleep.'

Hannes gave me a silent, long suffering look and for a moment I thought my question was too stupid or impertinent to warrant an answer.

'Because he didn't belong there. What he was doing didn't make any sense.'

'What do you mean? What didn't make sense?'

'He turned into a dog.'

'You saw him turn into a dog?'

Hannes November fell silent, shifting from foot to foot as he fingered his harpoon, a double bladed implement fashioned from sharpened sheep shears that he had devised in order to hunt the shapeshifter that he insisted had been prowling the settlement. At length he allowed his buddy, Luzuko, to speak for him.'I first saw him on my way home. He only looked like a dog from a distance. Up close it looked like something I had never seen before. It was so fucking lelik* I hit him with my beer bottle.' ( *ugly )

'Then what happened?'

''I chased after it but it grew wings and flew away!'

I nodded, realizing there was no point in asking any further questions.

Reports like this had been coming in from folk in Steytlerville and the neighbouring towns of Klipplaat and Willowmore for some months now. No-one seemed to be able to agree on exactly what the creature looked like other than the fact that it was reputed to be a black magician' or 'nagloper' – something that 'didn't belong' in any sane or normal world. I had heard tales of these xenomorphic spirits before in both the Karoo and Southern Namibia, indeed had based my second feature film 'Dust Devil' on the myth which in many respects parrallels the European vampire tradition. The 'night walker's were said to be of either gender and roamed the veldt in the company of baboons and owls, often gathering at appointed spots like witches meeting at a coven. Sometimes they were said to strip themselves of all clothing or to adorn their heads with human finger or toe bones before entering the huts of their prey, often walking backwards so their footprints would be pointing away from their destination. The occupants, even the dogs, would fall into a death like stupor so that the night walker's could batten on their life force. These wandering nocturnal spirits could be halted however and even destroyed by the use of a magic kerrie, a carved wooden baton analogous to the sharpened stake favored by Western vampire hunters. If the nagloper could be tricked into stepping across the kerrie which was often left lying across the doorways of huts as a form of protection, he could be rooted to the spot and stripped of its power in the same manner that one might imagine a lightning conductor is used to earth static electricity and hence draw the teeth from a storm.

Above: Image from 'Dust Devil' (1992)

Tales of the nagloper had fascinated me as a boy and perhaps it should have come as little surprise to find that the faceless beast was still stalking the back roads of 21^st century Africa. If the demon were really only a myth then it remained a very powerful one, a legend capable of endlessly reinventing itself, changing its colours and details to suit the times. The last thing I had expected was to find myself hot on the trail of the dust devil once more but despite the chaotic and far fetched nature of the first hand reports I'd hoovered up on my way across the Eastern Cape there was no escaping the unpleasant realization that here in Steytlerville the townsfolk were quite literally living in fear of something they could scarcely describe, let alone comprehend.

American's have their 'bigfoot' and Australians their 'bunyip' but despite sharing this neck of the bush with a burdgeoning population of baboons and other primates the South African's evidently felt no need to conjure up their own sasquatch, the more conventional furry humanoid, skin walker or yeti commonly reported abroad. The nagloper is an altogether more protean being, capable of defying the folklorist's attempts to readily contain, categorize or otherwise pigeonhole it's hallucinatory characteristics. While human in at least one of its facets the nagloper seems to be able to transform at will. Others hold that it may be the victim of a curse or even a resurrected corpse transformed by an evil witchdoctor into a bestial familiar sent forth to do his or her nocturnal bidding. All that anyone can agree on is that these beings seem drawn to towns like this one, sniffing out their fears and frustrations from a thousand miles away as a shark scents blood.

At face value Steytlerville is like any other one horse karoo town, with its dusty high street dominated by a white washed church and a central bar/hotel. This sleepy community was founded in 1786 by the Reverend Steytler and now stands at the centre of the Eastern Cape's wool and mohair industry.

Above: The Royal Hotel - Steytlerville

Below: St Paul's church - the oldest building in Steytlerville. The tumbleweed hanging from the ceiling has been placed there to deter bats.

To all intents and purposes the place should serve as a model of secure conservative values and Anglican rectitude were it not for the fact that the settlement stands at the very edge of baviaanskloof, the single largest remaining wilderness area on the subcontinent where previously unknown archaelogical remains and bushman sacred sites, not to mention whole new species of flora and fauna are still turning up on a daily basis.

In the summer of 2010-11 something else, something unimaginable crawled out of the African night to invade the town's collective consciousness.

Hefting his double edged harpoon like some sort of latter day Ahab, Hannes November started warily down the barren slope towards the stand of cactus. Under normal circumstances Hannes ran the local 'gaming store', what amounted to two ratty looking pool tables and a collection of aging video machines that occupied one half of the narrow concrete shed he called home. Hannes, like the other denizens of the sorry looking grey walled settlement that had sprung up on the outskirts of Steytlerville, was the victim of a peculiar sort of post-liberation apartheid. In a fumbling attempt at land reform the African National Congress had passed a plethora of new laws, ensuring that any family that lived in one particular premises for more than three generations would have a legitimate claim to the property. Fearing a situation similar to the one in Zimbabwe where a great many farmers had seen their homesteads confiscated by their labourers the land owners had responded by summarily moving the workers off their property, shunting them into vast, hastily built settlements such as this one. Accordingly the farm labourers were obliged to commute to work by bus, a grinding journey of many dusty miles while their families were forced to live in a squalour every bit as bad as the conditions experienced by previous generations under apartheid rule.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised that the sleep of reason had once again given birth to monsters...

"As above, so below: Two fanciful artist's impressions of the 'Steytlerville Monster' currently circulating on the net.

While the white farmers and townsfolk evidently believed in the shapeshifting demon that their Xhosa labourers referred to as 'Bawokazi' ( literally 'father's brother' or 'paternal uncle' – another word for 'big brother' one might say ) it was clear that they still felt reasonably secure behind the ramparts of their Dutch Reformed faith, white washed picket fences and broad, electrified streets. While the owner/manager of the Royal Hotel declined any comment on the affair he did make it clear that a guest at the only other hotel in town, the Theatrical Hotel on the outskirts of town, had seen the beast only a few days ago. He preferred not to think about such things and seemed of a mind to evict me from my room for having the temerity to mention them on his property. Here in the mean, lightless alleyways of the township sandwiched between the freeway and the open desert the dust devil was a living, breathing reality and grown men lay awake in their beds at night for fear of the nameless emanation from out of the wild that stalked their dreams and threatened their sanity.

There was no doubt that Hannes was crazy, of course, at least by any conventional definition of the term - one look in his eyes could tell you that immediately. The locals refered to him by his nickname, 'Bosvark' ( literally 'bush pig' ) and were evidently divided over what had really happened here but I couldn't help asking myself what it was about this stocky, bullet headed, God fearing man that had forced him to make a stand against the nameless nemesis that he believed had infiltrated and infected his impoverished settlement. When I asked him what had driven him to hunt the dust devil all Hannes could tell me was that he had been guided by the power of the Lord – 'die heerde' – to defend the community and his way of life.

'Two of my friends came with me. We came to within 25 metres of the monster,' muttered Hannes, slowing as we warily approached the scene of his previous encounter with the beast.

'Did you challenge it or try to communicate with it?'

'That's when I took my spear and told it 'Jy for my, ek vir jou'*!'

( * literally 'You for me, me for you' – a challenge to one on one combat )

Hannes gestured fiercely at the cactus with his harpoon, speaking the words by rote as if he were recounting something seen in a movie. I surmised that he had told the story so many times to his family, friends, police and local journalists that it had already lost any sense of objective reality to him.

'And that's when you saw him turn into a dog?'

He nodded slowly. 'It was a black dog with white legs. But it didn't bark. It didn't make a sound.'

'Then he ran away. And all the lights in the houses went out as he passed,' added Luzuko, making a sweeping motion with his hand. Behind him Hannes began to poke at an old sack lying at the base of the cactus, cautiously lifting it with the tip of his harpoon. 'That's what he was using to try and make a bed.'

I glanced at the sack disinterestedly. I think Hannes wanted me to take a photograph of it but quite frankly there didn't seem to be any point. There was something faintly pathetic about the idea of this immortal demon searching for nothing more than a quiet place to lay its head and get some rest.

'Do you think he's still around some place?'

Hannes looked past me for a moment, gazing out at the silent veldt.

'I heard he was in Klipplaat. Or maybe Willowmore. We hasn't come back here again.'

On the westernmost horizon a waxing crescent moon hovered above the dusty flatlands like a pair of huge crimson horns while above us the Milky Way shone with shocking clarity as if its stars were bright diamonds spread against the black velvet viewing board of the night.

'You scared him off, huh?'

'It wasn't me. It was the power of the Lord.'

'If you say so.' Reaching for my tobacco pouch I started back towards the dirt road where we had left the car. Beneath that scintillating cosmic panorama the tiny town of Steytlerville looked very small indeed, and not a little vulnerable.

After Hannes's stand off with the demon the police had vigorously searched the surrounding area. While no trace of the elusive 'Bawokazi' could be found Warrant Officer Zandisile Nelani had decided not to take any chances and officially opened a file on the sightings, urging residents who saw the beast to try and get some photographs next time. Thus far no snapshots or any other material evidence to support the 'Steytlerville Monster's physical existence have been forthcoming, suggesting that the answer to what really took place here might be found buried deep within the community's unconscious, in the socio-political tensions that haunted the new South Africa rather than within the realms of cryptozoology. Yet how many identical files lie gathering dust in the charge offices of small towns like this one spread out across the Great Karoo, Namaqua land and Southern Namibia? A great many, I suspect – their details oftimes curiously familiar, the paper trail of the dust devil, the undying shape shifter who will continue to walk these roads until the stars grow dim and the sun grows cold

To be continued....

Kingdom of the Dead

2011-03-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

"How now, old bare bones! What word of the worm?" Clark Ashton Smith, 1893-1961.

On the first day of spring Miss Scarlett and myself ( above ) rendezvoused with our friends Alex Wawerka and his partner Sylvie to descend the narrow spiral staircase beneath Avenue Rene Coty, adjacent to the Metro station of Denfert-Rochereau, in the southern suburbs of the city of Paris. Leaving the warm sunlight behind us we entered a veritable realm of the dead.

The legendary catacombs of Paris were created at the end of the 18th C. to serve as an ossuary. In 1780 Paris' largest cemetery, The Cimetiere des Saints-Innocents, located in the Les Halles district, was closed for public health reasons at the request of local residents. On the ninth of November the Council of State issued a decree requiring the removal of the human remains. The dolorous task of preparing the storage site fell to the quarries department which had been set up by the Royal Council for the purpose of protecting and reinforcing Paris' subterranean quarries and preventing subsidence. It was decided that bones from all the city's cemeteries would be stored in disused limestone quarries in the Tombe-Issoire district. This continued until 1860, notably during the extensive urban development carried out by Haussmann.

At the beginning of the 19th C, the catacombs were opened to the public, attracting large numbers of visitors. Inscriptions on the walls of the winding labyrinth provide the names of the streets above and details of works conducted in the corridors.

Moag, our benign, maleficent in-house daemon, ( above ) who accompanied us on our tour of the netherworld was particularly taken by the miniature buildings, towers and battlements carved into the walls of what has come to be known as the 'Port-Mahon' corridor.

These were apparently created by a mad quarryman named Decure, who had fought in the army's of Louis XV. Working alone in the darkness Decure sculpted an exact replica of Port-Mahon, the largest town on the island of Minorca, one of the Balearic Islands, where he is believed to have been held prisoner for man years by the English.

The gateway leading to the necropolis is framed by two stone pillars decorated with curious geometric figures. The lintel bears the inscription 'Arrete, c'estici l'empire de la mort' ( 'Stop! This is the empire of death!' ) and further along other maxims ad reflections on the fragility of human life can be found.

Plunging deeper into the lightless labyrinth we found ourselves surrounded by the remains of some six million Parisians,stacked in the 780 metres of corridors that run below the quadrilateral formed by avenue Rene Coty, rue Halle, rue Dareau and rue d'Alembert.

There is no sign in this stygian underworld of the heavens of light or hells of fire promised by the priests, sibyls and hierophants, only the dull realization that bodies are made of dust and water, the last of which is evaporable, and the former capable of dissolvement, a funerial wisdom that unlike the iron bound books of the prophets and the mighty grimoires of the sorcerers and sages can be readily accommodated within a single skull.

The first bones were brought here in 1786 and simply thrown in the corridors. it was only in 1810, under the Empire, that General Inspector of Quarries Hericart de Thury had the Catacombs arranged in an orderly fashion, forming a decorative facade with the skulls and long bones, behind which the remaining bones were piled in a vast heap.

'A reservoir of darkness, black as witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd with moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd...'

The tenebrous lanes of bone lead ever deeper into the irreverberate blackness of the abyss...

Down and down...

A spiral staircase leads still deeper to the 'bain de peds des carriers' or 'quarrymen's footbath', a pool of crystal clear groundwater uncovered by the quarry workers.

This eerie, silent pool never runs dry and was used by workers to mix cement during works in the catacombs.

Gazing down into the abysmal depths below I was reminded of the words of Thomas Moore: - '... Leaning to look if foot might pass down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath, as far as vision could explore, the jetty sides as smooth as glass, looking as if just varnished o'er with that dark pitch the Sea of Death throws out upon its slimy shore...'

Deep within the bowels of the Catacomb I came across a skull that bore the unmistakeable mark of a bullet hole ( above ) and this curious, painted visage which reminded me of Mark 13 and the 'HARDWARE' poster.

Et in Arcadia ego...

Returning to the surface we found ourselves curiously unmoved by the spectacle of mass death and our proximity to those old bones. Whatever it was that had once made them human seemed to have long departed, rendering them into little more than elaborate gothic decor. Reflecting on how little time we had left to us we made our way back towards the land of the living and the waiting railway station, knowing that there was still much work to be done this side of death and a great many more miles to go before we could afford to sleep.

To be continued...

- Special thanks to Alexis and Sylvie for the amazing b&w shots and the pic of Moag.

The Art of Light

2011-02-24T14:02:00.000-08:00

As the preparations for the Great Work traditionally begin in March, we thought we would offer for your amusement and edification this alchymical unveiling of the secrets of Notre Dame de Paris – written in the year of the Lord 2011 AD by the daemon Moag.

If you should have the opportunity to visit Notre Dame de Paris and climb the 387 stone steps to the narrow catwalk that threads its precarious way around the cathedral's towers you will find yourself in what is undoubtedly the largest roosting place for gargoyles in western Europe, if not the world. All around this beetling, gothic facade, which was restored by Eugene Violet-le-Duc in the 19^th century, swirls a frozen flux of gurning monsters, forgotten saints, rampant vices and unknown virtues. A motionless tidal wave of winged, crawling, clinging creatures inundates the basillica, scuttling up it's vertiginous walls to perch on every pinion, glowering triumphantly down at the sluggish waters of the Seine from their lofty buttress heights, seranaded by pigs with harps and dogs playing bagpipes as they dream away the centuries in the shadow of the great belfry, the favorite haunt of Quasimodo the fictional hunchback, where the colossal 17^th century Emmanuel bell can still be found that inspired Victor Hugo's celebrated and off-filmed romance. An icy wind croons in the distended jaws of the apex gargoyles as the haughty rulers of the roost rear their muzzles to the wintry sky while beneath them a ravening mob of lesser grotesqueries seethe and satanize, surging endlessly upwards to be trapped and caught forever in sockets of stone.

Amidst this delirious procession of lost idols, demonic demigods, chimarae and other nameless refugees from a medieval bestiary a solitary human figure stands aloof, leaning intently over the outermost edge of the parapet on one corner of the cathedral's north tower as if to draw our attention downwards towards the mighty edifice below. The unusual hat worn by this old man identifies him at once an adept, a master alchemist taking cogniesence of his completed work. The so-called 'Phrygian cap' is a red, conical hat associated in ancient times with the inhabitants of Phrygia, a region of central Anotolia and worn by the sans-culottes during the French revolution. In the western provinces of the Roman Empire it came to signify freedom from slavery and is sometimes referred to as a liberty cap, bringing to mind both the most commonly found ( not to mention the most potent ) form of indigenous European magic mushroom, the Psilocybe Semilanceata containing the psychoactive compounds psilocybin and baeocystin and frequently associated in popular mythology with the faery folk, pixies and gnomes who, more often than not, are depicted wearing conical crimson hats. Small is wise, after all and was not alchemy referred to in times gone by as the wise art?

The Phrygian cap was worn by the Anatolian god Attis, the twins Castor and Pollux and the Trojan hero Paris as well as King Midas who hoped the hat would hide the donkey ears given to him as a curse by Apollo. Over the course of the centuries the cap has frequently appeared on coins and national iconography in France, Haiti and the Americas. It appears on the official seal of the United States Senate and the US Army War Office whose badge depicts a Phrygian cap on an upturned sword surmounted by the words 'This We'll Defend'. This can be readily explained by the caps usage as a Masonic symbol and the supreme badge of initation, refered to as a liberia in the Mithraic rituals. The occult scholar Pierre Dujols writes that ' for the grade of the Epopt in the Eleusian Mysteries the new member was asked whether he felt in himself the strength, the will and the devotion necessary for him to set his hand to the GREAT WORK. Then a red cap was put on his head, while this formula was pronounced: 'Cover yourself with this cap, it is worth more than a king's crown...' The goal of that level of initiation was to elevate man above the human sphere into the divine and to asure his redemption by making him into a god and so conferring immortality upon him.

The alchemist of Notre Dames strokes his beard with one hand while keeping watch over the edifice beneath him, a vast symphony of stone that contains hidden within it's design and copious decoration the secret of the gods, the key to the so-called 'philosopher's stone' and immortality itself. If we follow the alchemist's direction and take the spiral staircase downwards armed with a copy of Fulcanelli's celebrated exegesis, 'The Mystery of the Cathedrals', it is still possible, even in this debased day and age for a dilligent student to unlock the symbollic message encrypted in Notre Dame's gargantuan book of stone and scry the secret of secrets passed down to us from elder times, hidden in plain sight, so to speak, yet readily intelligible to those who have eyes to see.

It is not my purpose here to enter into any further debate over the master alchemist's true identity save to say that, to some extent, Fulcanelli's book broke the untold centuries of silence that surrounded the GREAT WORK by revealing to the layman that gothic architecture contained a densely coded ‘secret language’ or 'argot' - ‘Argot’ is defined as a language peculiar to all individuals who wish to communicate their thoughts without being understood by outsiders, an idea Fulcanelli related to the legend of the Argo - the vessel that bore the precious cargo of the ‘Golden Fleece’ in the same manner as the coded architecture of the great gothic cathedrals carried within them the key to a hidden science, a ‘self-censoring secret’, communicable only to the ‘elect’. According to Fulcanelli, this symbolic code was the ‘language of the birds’, the mythic common language spoken by King Solomon and the philosopher Tiresias who was said to have ‘lived seven, eight, or nine ages of man’ and been ‘both man and woman’ According to the master alchemist 'gothic art is in fact the art got or cot – the art of light or of the spirit' - a self-censoring secret communicable only to the elect - what Fulcanelli described as the "language of a minority of individuals living outside accepted laws, conventions, customs and etiquette... the language of the humble, the poor, the despised, the rebels and wanderers, the vagrants of the Court of Miracles and the Freemasons of the Middle Ages, who built the gothic masterpieces we admire today...'

There would be no point in recapitulating the contents of Fulcanelli's magnum opus, the first volume in a projected trilogy left incomplete at the time of his death or, as some would have it, his transition to a higher plane of being. For those who do not already possess a copy of 'The Mystery of the Cathedrals' the full text is available for free download from Terra Umbra: -

http://www.shadowtheatre13.com/mysterycathedrals.html

What follows is intended as a suppliment and further illumination of this occult work which remains one of the finest esoteric guide books of its kind. For the general reader who has no stomach for this sort of advanced esoterica I suggest you tune out now and find something more immediately stimulating with which to occupy yourself – group sex, mah jong or alligator wrestling spring to mind. I promise the next installment of this infrequent 'blog will contain more conventional titilation with all the thrills, spills and conundrums you've come to expect from the Terra Umbra crew. For those who have a more abiding interest in penetrating the secrets of this gothic edifice our grand tour will continue, taking a sharp left turn into more willfully hermetic territory.

Arriving at ground level we find ourselves, book in hand, facing the doors of the cathedral and the lavishly decorated grand porch – or Porch of Judgement. On the central column which divides the enrance bay can be seen the figure of a woman with her head touching the clouds. Seated on a throne, she holds in her left hand a sceptre, the sign of royal power, while her right hand supports two books symbolizing text and subtext, exotericism and esotericism. Note the manner in which she holds that sceptre and the curious position of her fingers. Leaning against her chest is a ladder with nine rungs – the scala philosophorum – representing according to Fulcanelli 'the patience which the faithful must possess in the course of the nine successive operations of the hermetic labour.' For the master alchemist this grand porch is the frontispiece of an occult bible, a Mutus Liber whose massive pages are made of stone. To become an adept the initiate must literally climb an analogic ladder of correspondences.

To aid and abet your understanding of what follows I offer the following crib notes – a thumb nail guide to the substances involved in the great work and the symbols, colours and planets commonly associated with them.

Mercury, planet Mercury: the substance, the Matter to be worked on. originally you have to find out what it is. For the Hermetic Alchemists it is of course you yourself, what includes your body, your mind (=emotions and thoughts) and your divine essence.
Lead, planet Saturn: the beginning of the state of Blackness. The Matter is putrefying and dissolving.
Tin, planet Jupiter: the color gray that appears at the end of the process of Blackness, when the Matter has been purified to almost a perfect white. Jupiter is the son of Saturn, therefore he is the next stage.
Copper, planet Venus: the citrine color. Venus is the next stage because she was born when the testicles of Jupiter, cut off by his father Saturn, fell into the sea.
Silver, the Moon: the white color, corresponding to the state of Whiteness or Albedo. The Matter has been completely purified. In Greek mythology the Moon is symbolized by the huntress goddess Diane. Diane is the daughter of Jupiter and Latone.
Iron, planet Mars: Mars is the friend and lover of Venus. Orange or rust-red color, like the light of dawn. It is the state during which the Matter starts to become red.
Gold, the Sun: this is the last state; the red color or Rubedo. Here the Matter is called Red Sulfur, among other terms. The sun god Apollo.

On either side of the cathedral's great doorway can be found two arched niches, each containing an enigmatic bas relief. On the left hand pillar can be found a representation of the alchemist discovering the mysterious fountain , a stream of living water that gushes from a hollow oak, a universal solvent, capable of penetrating every metal – gold in particular – it's volatile spirit indicated by a bird perched on the tree. In mythology this solvent, capable of accomplishing the great task, is called Libethra and is said to have been a fountain of Magnesia that issued from a large rock shaped like a woman's bosom, the water seeming to flow like milk from her two breasts.

Magnesia is in Pelion, the home of the centaurs from whence the Argos set sail. The word magnet comes from the Greek "magnítis líthos" (μαγνήτης λίθος), which means "magnesian stone". The names for the elements magnesium and manganese are also derived from this region, which in addition to the magnetic magnetite (an iron ore), produces certain ores of magnesium and manganese that were known to alchemists.

In ancient times, two black minerals derived from Magnesia in what is now modern Greece were both called magnes, but were thought to differ in gender. The male magnes attracted iron, and was the iron ore we now know as lodestone or magnetite. The female magnes ore did not attract iron, but was used to decolorize glass. This feminine magnes was later called magnesia, known in modern times as pyrolusite or manganese dioxide. Neither this mineral nor manganese itself is magnetic. In the 16th century, manganese dioxide was called manganesum (note the two n's instead of one) by glassmakers, possibly as a corruption and concatenation of two words, since alchemists and glassmakers eventually had to differentiate magnesia negra (the black ore) from magnesia alba (a white ore derived from Magnesia that was useful in glassmaking) .

Magnesium is the seventh most abundant element in the Earth's crust by mass and eighth by molarity. It is found in large deposits of magnetite, dolomite, and other minerals, and in mineral waters, where magnesium ion is soluble. In 1618, a farmer at Epsom in England attempted to give his cows water from a well. They refused to drink because of the water's bitter taste. However the farmer noticed that the water seemed to heal scratches and rashes. The fame of Epsom salts spread. Eventually they were recognized to be hydrated magnesium sulfate, MgSO4.

Virgin's milk, in alchemy, is the pure white texture created by the albedo and which could transform based metals into silver. The term is also applied to the white philosophical mercury--mercurial water or "water of life"--known as Mercurius.

On the lower part of the facade that extends below the three porches can be found twelve figures and twelve small bas reliefs arranged in two corresponding rows, a cryptic frieze designed by the venerable Guillaume de Paris in the early 13^th century. The upper row would seem to represent the actions performed by the alchemist while the lower case, inset in circular niches, represent the resulting chemical reactions, reminding us once again of the first law of magic: - As above, so below.

Let us examine these curious panels in further detail...

( 1 ) The alchemist protects the Athenor against external influences.

In alchemy an athanor is a furnace used to provide heat for alchemical digestion. An Athanor is a self-feeding furnace, designed to maintain a uniform temperature.

The athanor was also called Piger Henricus, Slow Harry, because it was chiefly used in slower operations, and because when once filled with coals, it keeps burning a long time. For this reason the Greeks referred to it as "giving no trouble", as it did not need to be continually attended. It was also called the Philosophical furnace, Furnace of Arcana, or popularly, the Tower furnace.

According to Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius, Athanor is an occult hill, surrounded by mist except on its southern side which is clear. On it is a well, which is four paces in breadth, from which an azure vapor ascends, drawn up by the warm sun. The bottom of the well is covered with red arsenic. Nearby is a basin filled with fire from which rises a livid flame, odorless and smokeless and never higher or lower than the edge of the basin. Also, there are two black stone reservoirs, in one of which is kept the wind and in the other the rain. In extreme the water cistern is opened and clouds escape to water the whole country.

Clearly this description should be interpreted as alchemical symbolism, since the Athenor is the furnace which supplies the heat for the alchemical process. The term Athanor is also employed to denote moral and philosophical alchemy.

( 2 ) The Crow – Putrefaction

In the symbolic language of alchemy a veritable bestiary of animals are deployed to illustrate the key phases in the great work.

Blackening - Black Crow, Raven, Toad, Massa Confusa.
Whitening - White Swan, White Eagle, skeleton.
Greening - Green Lion.
Rapid cycling through iridescent colours - Peacock's Tail.
White Stone - Unicorn.
Reddening - Pelican feeding young with its own blood, cockerel.
Final transmutation - Phoenix reborn from the fire.

The phase of Blackening which usually marks the beginning of the work, is brought about either by heating the prima materia in the process of Calcination (the 'dry way' ), or by the process of Putrefaction, a slow rotting or digestion over a period of weeks or months (the so-called 'wet way'). The Black Crow or Raven was often associated with this Calcination, for on vigorous heating the calcined material will usually carbonise and layers flake off and move like a crow's wings in the flask. The Toad is a better symbol of the Putrefaction, the decaying mass slowly pulsating and shifting as gasses are given off, while the substance rots down to a black mass. Another symbol of this stage is the dragon, a familiar inhabitant of the alchemist's flasks. The dragon however is a more complex symbol and is also used when winged as a hieroglyph for the spiritualising of the earthly substance. Thus to the alchemists the dragon appears at the beginning and at the end of the work.

The alchemists paralleled these experiences in their souls as a withdrawal into the darkness of their interior space, a darkness pregnant with possibility. We have to a great extent lost the sense that still lived in the medieval and renaissance alchemists, that this darkness contained all potentialities. Like children we fear the dark, and for twenty-first century humanity darkness often holds only an existential dread - philosophers of science have in the last few decades brought us the terrifying image of the 'Black Hole' which swallows up and annihilates all that strays beyond it's event horizon. Perhaps we do not gaze enough at the blackness of the heavens, for if we look deep into the blackness of space on a clear night, we will sense more stars hidden between the known visible stars, especially in the vast star fields of the Milky Way. Cosmic space is pregnant with the possibility of other worlds as yet unseen. It is this image of blackness we must try to recover if we are to become alchemists. An echo of this perhaps remains in the often used phrase "a profound darkness". In alchemy, to meet with the black crow is a good omen. Thus in the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, as our hero sets out on his journey of transformation, he meets with a crow which by a turn of fate decides which among the various paths open to him is the one that will lead him to the castle of the King .

( 2 ) Philosophic Mercury

The second bas relief shows a figure holding a shield that bears the caduceus, a snake coiled around a golden wand, a symbol that for Fulcanelli indicates 'the incisive and solvent nature of the Mercury, which avidly absorbs the metallic sulphur and holds it so powerfully that the cohesion cannot be later overcome...This reptile is the aspect of Mercury in its first state and the golden wand is the corporeal sulphur, which is added to it...It is the first class matter cooking in order to be transformed first into red sulphur, then into Elixir, and the third time into the universal Medicine...'

The alchemists refer to three forms of mercury.
The first mercury is known as vulgar mercury
The second mercury is called common volatile mercury or conceptual mercury
The third mercury is philosophic

The three essentials unified are the Triplex Mercury of the Philosophers. According to Artofferus: "That which is Philosophical is not visible. But may become visible by condensation."

( 3 ) The Salamander - Calcination

The next bas relief shows a woman with hair like flame who holds the disc of the salamander 'which lives in the fire and feeds on fire'. According to the master alchemist's treatise this represents the 'incombustible and fixed central salt, which preserves its nature even in the ashes of the calcinated metals and which the ancients called metallic seed. The parts of the body which can be burnt are destroyed in the violence of the igneous process, only the pure, unalterable parts resist and although they are very fixed, they can be extracted by percolation. This is, at least, the spagyric expression of calcination, a simile used by authors to exemplify the general idea which one should have of the hermetic work...'

The "Starry Salamander That lives in the Fire" is also known as the Mercurial Spirit of the prima materia. The salamander in its natural changeable form represents the mercurial nature of the adaptive psyche. Once the salamander is roasted, this changeable tendency is halted and turned to ash. As with all the alchemical procedures, the importance is not a literal performance but in understanding on a metaphorical and symbolic level. The psyche itself, comprised of ego, self and accompanying complexes, is what undergoes these transformations. Each aspect moves from a conglomerate state to a more purified state. In other words, as the person becomes fully individuated, this state is more evident.

The alchemy of transformation is driven by the bipolar of soul and spirit. The salamander, as a symbol of soul, is attracted to the blazing heat of the Sun, while the bird of spirit is attracted to the coolness of the Moon. This is similar in meaning to the Tai Chi symbol representing the interplay of the feminine yin and masculine yang energies. In this process, one thing takes on the characteristics of the other as it becomes its opposite. This is the relationship between Mercury and Sulfur in alchemy, and explains why Mercury is sometimes associated with soul and other times associated with spirit. The same is true of Sulfur. The alchemists believed that within this interplay could be found the source of the life force. Carl Jung called this overall process of one thing changing its opposite by the unfortunately unwieldy name of “inandromedria.” Together Spiritus, Anima, and Corpus (Spirit, Soul, and Body) form the Three Essentials behind anything, the celestial archetypes that the alchemists termed Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt.

Jung's original interest in alchemy came from a dream where he had an library filled with arcane tomes from Medieval and Renaissance times. He spent the next fifteen years collecting this library. Along the way he learned to recognize the major symbols of the unconscious after reading about them in alchemical treatises and hearing about them in his patients dreams and fantasies. Their projections told him of an inner quest, a sealed vessel, the conflict of opposites, a philosophical tree, a fountain of eternity, a golden flower, a Stone, a sacred wedding, etc.

Grossinger says that "what Carl Jung recognized was the stages, as if the alchemists also corresponded to a process of psychological individuation. The psychic stages were as precise and rigorous as the chemical ones. Futhermore, they generated a physical and even quantitative terminology for an undiagnosed tension of opposites in the human psyche arising from male and female archetypes, a struggle they sought to resolve by the creative unity of chemicals in the Stone." Alchemy sought to unite Spirit (male) and Matter (female) through a Royal Union (coniunctio) to create their synthesis in the homunculus, hermaphrodite, or lapis. This is an alchemical metaphor for the process of spiritual rebirth.

( 4 ) Preparation of the universal solvent

The many biochemical interactions occurring in living organisms—human, animal, and plant—could not occur in the absence of a solvent environment. Water is considered to be the earth's universal solvent. The fluid substance, mostly water, within and around the cell is a solvent that contains many dissolved substances called solutes.

Combining a solvent and a solute results in either a solution, a colloidal dispersion, a suspension, or an emulsion. These mixtures differ from each other based on the size or solubility of their solutes.

Alkahest is a hypothetical universal solvent having the power to dissolve every other substance, including gold. It was much sought after by alchemists for what they thought would be its invaluable medicinal qualities. The name is believed to have been invented by Paracelsus from Switzerland, who modelled it on similar words taken from Arabic, such as ‘alkali’. Paracelsus' own recipe was based on caustic lime, alcohol, and carbonate of potash. He believed that this element alkahest was, in fact, the philosopher's stone. A potential problem involving alkahest is that, if it dissolves everything, then it cannot be placed into a container, because it would dissolve the container. However, philosopher Philalethe specifies that Alkahest dissolves only composed material into their constituent, elemental, parts. Alkahest is also known as 'The Green Lion', not so much because it is green in color as because it has not yet acquired those mineral characteristics, which in chemistry distinguish the adult state from the nascent one. In modern times water is sometimes described as the universal solvent as well, because it can dissolve a large variety of substances, due to its chemical polarity.

( 5 ) Evolution - colours and processes of the Great Work

The three colors succeed one another in an invariable order, going from black, through white, to red. But since, according to the old saying, Natura non facit saltus – nature does not proceed by a leap, there are many intermediate stages between these three principal ones. The artist does not attach much importance to them since they are transitory and fleeting. They serve only as a witness to the continuity and the progress of internal changes. As for the main colors, they last longer than these tranistory shades and have a profound effect on the matter itself, marking a change of state into chemical constitution. None of those fugitive and more or less brillant tints are meant here, which play upon the surface of the bath, but rather the coloring within the body itself, which are translated to the outside and which reabsorb all the others.

The color black is given to Saturn - Lead, in alchemical terms, definitely has an androgynous nature with qualities of cold and damp allowing it to be called an arcane substance representing the lusterless prime matter. Lead represents the impurities of metals and humans. Meanings death, chaos, night, the black hen, the black dragon, the Cimmerian darkness.

Just as in the Book of Genesis days succeeds night, so light succeeds darkness. Its signature is the color white. The Wise assure us that when their matter has reached this degree, it is free from all impurity, perfectly cleansed and very exactly purified. It then takes on the appearance of solid granulationsor shining corpuscles, reflecting like diamonds of a dazzling whiteness. White is the color of the Iniate, because the man who abndons the darkness to follow the light , passes from the profane state to that of the Initiate, the Pure. He is spiritually renewed. The white swan.

As for red , the symbol of fire, it shows exhaltation, predominance of the spirit over matter, sovereignty, power and apostleship. This Philosophic Stone, obtained in the volatile and fusible form of crystal or red powder, becomes penetrating and capable of curing leprosy, that is to say of trnasmuting into gold those ordinary metals whose tendancy to rust renders them inferior, imperfect, 'sick and infirm'.

The preparation of Vermilion ( mercuric sulfide ) from mercury and sulphur was worked out in all details. Vermilion and mercury itself were considered by some adepts to be the preliminary stage to the 'Philosophers Stone' – a magic substance which was capable of transmuting base metals into gold.

( 6 ) The four elements and the two Natures

The elemental system used in Medieval alchemy was developed by the Arabic alchemist, Jabir ibn Hayyan and others. His original system consisted of the four classical elements found in the ancient Greek traditions (air, earth, fire and water), in addition to two philosophical elements: sulphur, ‘the stone which burns’, which characterized the principle of combustibility, and mercury, which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties. The three metallic principles: sulphur to flammability or combustion, mercury to volatility and stability, and salt to solidity became the tri prima of the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, who reasoned that Aristotle’s four element theory appeared in bodies as three principles. Paracelsus saw these principles as fundamental, and justified them by recourse to the description of how wood burns in fire. Mercury included the cohesive principle, so that when it left in smoke the wood fell apart. Smoke described the volatility (the mercury principle), the heat-giving flames described flammability (sulphur), and the remnant ash described solidity (salt).

( 7 ) The Athenor and the stone

On the seventh bas relief of the series – the first one on the right – we see a vertical section of the Athenor ( the self feeding furnace ) and the internal appartus intended to support the Philosopher's egg. The human figure holds a stone in the right hand.

( 8 ) Conjunction of Sulphur and Mercury

The Hermaphrodite represents Sulphur and Mercury after their Conjunction. Rebis (something double in characteristics) is another designation for this point in the alchemy of transformation.

Nature obtains in this way pure Mercury, completely free of its earthy substance that no longer contains any foreign element. Then she unites it to pure Sulphur and produces at last in earth's womb the pure and perfect metals. If both principles are impure, so are the metals. This is the reason why in mines one finds different metals, which is explained by the different purification and digestion of their principles. This depends on the coction.

Matter and form are only contained (as saith the Philosophers) by the Generation of Nature, but they understand by the matter and form, the Agent and Patient, thin and thick, Sulphur and Mercury, male and female, and by consequence know Generation.

( 9 ) The materials necessary for making the Solvent

The ninth subject gives us the opportunity of learning again the secret for making the universal solvent. In it a woman shows- allegorically- the materials necessary for the construction of the hermetic vessel. She holds up a small piece of wood looking rather like the stave of a barrel, the nature of which is revealed by the oak branch born on the shield. Here again we find this mysterious spring, this fire of nature, without which nothing can grow down here. It is this spirit, spread over the surface of the globe, which the subtle and ingenious artist must capture as and when it appears. Also, I must add, a specific body is needed to serve as a receptacle; an attracting medium, containg a principle spirit and 'embodying' it. The spirit is the lodestone sealed in the belly of Aries, which must be seized with speed and skill at the moment of its birth.

The Sulphur you must seek in the house of Aries, this is the magic fire of the wise, to heat the Kings bath, (which you may prepare in a weeks time) this fire lies concealed, which you may unlock in an hour's time, and afterward wash it with a silver shower.

( 10) the fixed Body

The emblem of the lion is generally the sign of gold, both alchemical and natural. It thus represents the physico-chemical properties of these substances. But the texts give the same name to the matter which is receptive to the universal spirit, the secret fire, during the processing of the solvent. In both cases it represents power, incorruptability and perfection, these being further indicated clearly enough by the warrior with drawn sword, the mail-clad knight, displaying the king of the alchemical bestiary.

As far as the fixed body in mercury is concerned it is less mobile, it flows less quickly than the other Mercury; it leaves traces of its fixed body in the fire: one drop placed on a thin plate heated to red leaves a residue.

( 11 ) Union of the Fixed and the Volatile

The object is to make a volatile subject fixed or solid, so that it remains permanently unaffected by fire. Alchemy knows a lot of opposite images, like water and fire, dryness and wetness, warmth and cold, the volatile and the fixed, the bodily and the spiritual, the Sun and the Moon, gold and silver, circle and square and so on. The union of these opposites already constitutes a coniunctio. Coniunctio is also the union of divine or spiritual energies with earthly energies known as the chymical wedding or the sacred marriage

( 12 ) Philosophic Sulphur

Considered as a sign of the zodiac , this is the second month of the preparatory operations of the first work, and the first process of the elementary proces of the second. Since the bull and ox were sacred to the sun, just as the cow was to the moon, the bull as a symbol represents Sulphur, the male principle, the sun being described by Hermes as the father of the Stone. The bull and the cow, the sun and the moon, sulphur and mercury are thus hieroglyphics, identical in meaning and designating the primitive, contrary natures before their conjunction.

Sulphur is yellow in color and melts to a blood red liquid emitting a blue flame. In ancient times sulphur was known as 'brimstone' and was mainly found around hot springs and volcanic locations. The alchemists considered mercury to be the First Matter from which all metals were formed. They believed that different metals could be produced by varying the quality and quantity of sulphur contained within the mercury. The purest of these was gold and mercury was called for in attempts at the transmutation of base ( or impure ) metals into gold, which was the goal of many alchemists.

Mercury forms alloys with most metals except iron and combines with sulphur at ordinary temperature. Mercuric Sulfide, Red ( Vermilion ) occurs in nature as the mineral cinnabar. ( Bright scarlet-red, cnsidered as a royal colour in some cultures )

(13 ) Cohobation

In pre-modern chemistry and alchemy cohobation was the process of repeated of the same matter, with the liquid drawn from it; that liquid being poured again and again upon the matter left at the bottom of the vessel.

( 14 ) Origin and Result of the Stone

On the second medallion, the Initiate holds up a mirror in one hand, while in the other he holds up the horn of Amalthea (the cornicopia of plenty). Beside him is seen the Tree of Life. The mirror symbolized the beginning of the work , the Tree of Life marks its end and the horn of plenty the result.

The Alchemical tree of life:

1Kether: Mercury

2 Chokmah: Sulphur

3Binah: Salt

4Chesed: Luna

5Geburah: Sol

6Tiphareth: Mars

7Netzach: Jupiter

8Hod: Venus

9Yesod: Mercury

10Malkuth: Mercurius Philosophorum

From the Alchemical tradition, the Tree of Life is a symbol of the Opus Magnum, the goal of the alchemical journey, which is to find "the gold", "the philosopher's stone" , "the elixir of life". A branch from the Tree of Life was said to protect the Alchemist on his or her journey through the alchemical stages of separation, decay and purification in fires of the underworld. A quote from the Teatrum Chemicum says, "Plant the Tree on the lapis that the birds of the sky can come and reproduce on its branches; it is from there that wisdom rises.'

( 15 )The Knowledge of Weights

Next comes the allegory of the weight of nature in which the alchemist draws back the veil, covering the scales.

( 16 )The Queen kicks down Mercury, Servus Fugitivus

Hermes describes Mercury as the Runaway Slave on account of the escaping moisture.

( 17 ) The Reign of Saturn

A bent old man is huddled under the arch of the next medallion, his back stooped. Cold and feeble he leans on a block of stone. Fulcanelli recognizes in this bas relief the first phase of the second work, when the hermetic Rebus, enclosed in the ark of the Athenor suffers the dislocation of its parts and becomes mortified. 'It is the active and gentle beginning of the fire of the wheel, symbolized by cold and by winter, the embryonic season when the seeds, shut up in the womb of the philosophic earth, are subject to the fermentative influence of humidity.' The reign of Saturn, who devours his own children, is the time of old age, death and radical dissolution, of decomposition, the color black and the substance of lead. According tp 'The Chemist's Key' by Henry Nollius ( 1617 ): - ' Of this lead or Saturn the poets have written much, telling us that Saturn devours all his children, etc. Note this. His sulphur consumes all that is hid in the matter enclosed in it's belly, digests and concocts it to it's ripeness. But Jupiter, observing this, with his sharp scythe cuts off the stones of Saturn and throws them into the sea, because the white sulphur, which in the operation appears after blackness abolishes by his piercing power, which is here called the scythe, the strong power of the black sulphur called Saturn and throws the same into the sea. The black sulphur comes to be dissolved and changed into a sea, out of which the fair Venus is generated which is the green colour. Saturn endeavors to devour Jupiter or the white sulphur, but instead of him he swallows a stone which was laid before him, which he spews up again upon the mountain of Helicon...'

Mount Helicon in Boeotia, Greece is sacred to the muses. It is where the mysterious fountain, the Hippocrene spring, burst forth after Pegasus, the winged horse, kicked the rock with his hoof, thus symbolizing the beginning of the next phase of the GREAT WORK.

One Demetrius was sent by the Roman Emperor to explore the British Isles, and in his report of them he says: “Moreover there is an island there in which Cronos (Saturn) is imprisoned, with Briareus keeping guard while he sleeps. Sleep, they say, is the bond forged for Cronos.”

( 18 ) The Subject of the Wise

The Adept is seen with his hands joined in an attitude of prayer and seems to be giving thanks to Nature, shown as the head and the shoulders of a woman reflected in a mirror. We recognize the hieroglyph as showing the subject of the wise, the mirror in which 'one sees the whole of nature disclosed'.

The Cosmoplolite writes in 'The Six Keys of Eudoxus': -'... But, further, that you may not be deceived with the terms of the Compound, I will tell you that the philosophers have two sorts of compounds. The first is the compound of Nature, wherof I have spoken in the First Key; for it is Nature which makes it in a manner incomprehensible to the Artist, who does nothing but lend a hand to Nature by the adhibition of external things, by the means of which she brings forth and produces this admirable compound.

The second is the compound of Art; it is the Wise man who makes it by the secret union of the fixed with the volatile, perfectly conjoined with all prudence, which cannot be acquired but by the lights of a profound philosophy...'

( 19 ) The entrance of the Sanctuary

On the right of the porch, the seventh medallion shows us an old man ready to cross the threshold of the Mysterious Palace. He has just torn down the awning, which hid the entrance from the eyes of the uninitiated. The first step of the practice has been achieved, the discovery of the agent capable of carrying out a reduction of the fixed body in a form analogous to that of its first substance. The alchemists are alluding to this operation when they speak of reanimating the corpifications, that is to say giving life to the dead metals. The old man is none other than our Mercury, the secret agent, whose nature, method of action, materials and time of preparation have been reveled to us in senveral bas-reliefs. As for the palace, it represents the living, philosophic or base gold, despised by the ignorant and hidden under rags, which conceal it from our eyes, although it is extremely precious to one who knows its value.

( 20 ) Dissolution. Combat of two Natures

The next circle enables us to witness the encounter of the old man and the crowned king; the solvent and the body; the volatile principles and the fixed metallic salt, which is incombustible and pure. In the second method the hermetic mercury seems to attack the metal with chracteristic vigour, closely resembling chemical effervescence. The wise have said that in Conjunction violent storms arose and the waves of the sea presented the spectacle of bitter 'combat'. This describes the formation of the philosophical compound by comparing it to that of the terrestrial chaos, which results in upheavels and reactions of fire and water, air and earth. Here, the two natures are represented by aggressive and quarrelsome children, who have come to blows and hit each other unsparingly. At the height of the fray, one of them drops a pot and the other a stone. It would scarcely be possible to describe more clearly or simply the action of pontic water on the heavy matter and this medallion does a great credit to the master who conceived it. ( Pontic water, in case you were wondering, is a geological term pertaining to sediments deposited in deep and motionless pools such as an acumulation of black shales and dark limestones deposited in a stagnant basin )

( 21 ) The Dog and the doves

This is the dog of Corascene, which Artephius and Philalethes say one must know how to seperate from the compost into the state of black powder.

As Kalid ibn Jazid (c. 700 CE) wrote in the Liber Secretorum: - "Hermes said, My son, take a Corascene dog and an Armenian bitch, join them together, and they will beget a dog of celestial hue, and if ever he is thirsty, give him sea water to drink, ... and he will help you ... in this world and the next." (Jung, MC 147)

( 22 ) Solve et Coagula

This terrifying figure illustrates the alchemical maxim solve et coagula, which teachs how to achieve the elementary conversion by violatilizing the fixed and fixing the volatile - literally to separate and join together, to dissolve and coagulate. One of my favourite appearances of this particularly creepy symbol is in the outstanding short film by Dennison Ramalho 'Love for Mother only' ( 2003 ) in which a possesses Santeria priestess is seen to carve the magical formula into her own living flesh with the tip of a sacrifical blade in an effort to sever her lover's emotional ties with his ageing mother and thus bind him to her and her demonic masters forever.

If you know how to dissolve the fixed,

And the make the dissolved fly.

Then to fix the flying powder,

You have something to console yourself with.

Having lingered on the porch long enough let us proceed into the ark of the cathedral to bask in the the genius of Guillaume de Paris ( also known as William of Auvergne 1180-1249 ), the designer of the motifs we have already admired and whose perspicacity we must bless, for he was able to forsee the damage that time would do to his work. Like the wise master that he was, he had the motifs of the medallions reproduced on the panes of the central rose window. Thus, glass compliments stone and, thanks to the help of the fragile material the hidden meaning regains its primal purity. The art of light shines forth in all it's timeless glory...

'...What a profound subject for meditation is offered to us by our ancenstral hermetic Idea, in all its harmony and unity! In stone on the facade, in glass, in the enormous orb of the rose window, it passes from silence to revelation, from solemnity to excitement, from inertia to vivid expression. Solid, worn and cold in the crude light outside, it flashes into multicoloured facets from the curstal permeates through the nave, vibrant, warm, diaphanous and pure as Truth itself.”

And so we have come to the end of our grand tour and yet we are still only beginning. The secret of life eternal is within our reach yet we still little more than children, playing on the outermost doorstep of eternity...

The Door into Summer...

2010-06-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

From the private journal of Scarlett Amaris - Montsegur - 21 June 2010

It had been raining for weeks on end, day after day of cold wind and gray skies. Even this late in June, Our Lady of the Snows made a return visit and had been seen creeping stealthily back down the Pic de Saint Barthelemy. Summer seemed like a fantasy, something that we tricked ourselves into believing every morning just to put up with another day of plummeting temperatures. This was surely not the way to celebrate the solstice. Christmas perhaps, but not the supposed midpoint of summer. Glamour and magic are hard pressed to prosper under dankness and frostbite. Still, even in these absolutely wretched conditions, the faithful gathered at the castle in the gloom of the early morning. The icy rain had washed out the pyrotechnic 'spectacle' originally planned for the night before forcing the pilgrims to take refuge in the town hall at Montferrier where the bedraggled survivors had been treated to an impromptu evening of Occitan folk music. Some were brave enough to weather the arctic conditions on the pog itself but we decided to take the darkened path once the wind had dropped in the early morning as the first hint of blue touched the skies.

Storm clouds rolled across the horizon in an endless sea of grey and the bonfire built the night before still stood forlorn and unkindled on the 'camp de cremat'. The first rays of so-called sunlight were all but invisible, diffused through the relentless cloud cover. In the donjon tower room, people gathered from Chile, England, Norway, Germany and other places unknown, praying that the clouds would part and allow a beam or two through. People looked cold and some a little sleepy, but suprisingly no one looked upset or disappointed by the weather. There was a general sense of good feeling all around, of happiness to be in that place for the solstice no matter what happened - a sense that just making the journey there had been enough. Finally, the light did break and for a minute the sun shone through, affording those assembled a brief glimpse of the phenomena that they had come from all four corners of the earth to witness. For a moment those familiar, eerie red beams flickered across the tower walls. Then it was gone as fast as it came, but it was enough to set a collective gasp and murmur rolling through the onlookers.

As above: Solstice light - Approx. 6.00 am (photograph courtesy of Ivan de Castries)
So below: Ivan, Richard and Ivan's brother - June 21 2010

Extracts from Richard Stanley's weblog - Montsegur - June 21 2010

"What are you doing here?" asked the parka clad journalist in broken English, clinging grimly to her note pad as she cast about herself in the early morning light in search of a story. "Are you here for a spiritual reason?"

"I live here." I brushed past her, swinging one leg over the gantry rail before jumping down onto the crowded floor of the tower room where our friend, Ivan, was holding forth to a bemused camera crew from T.F.1.

"Why do you have that cross on your shirt?" asked the interviewer, doggedly shielding his mike from the glacial wind.

"The Cathar cross? It's the symbol of your country", Ivan jabbed the tip of his finger at the emblem. "You should recognize it!"

The journalist nodded along, his confusion deepening. I didn't hear the rest of what Ivan had to say but I appreciated the sentiment. The press pack didn't seem to realize they were no longer in France but standing in the veritable throne room of free Occitania but that didn't really matter. Just being there was all that counted. Above us the last ruddy glow of the 'solstice effect', a curious red square projected against the upper reaches of the donjon wall, flickered and dimmed...

As usual we were the last to leave. None of us really wanted to go back to the world but the weather showed no sign of breaking and Ivan and his bro' were facing a long drive back to Barcelona. We talked of many things as we hit the downward trail, of Otto Rahn and absent friends and of Belibaste, the 'last parfait' who perished at the stake in 1321. Ivan was optimistic that Belibaste's prophecy, that the 'laurel will turn green again' after 700 years would be borne out, that the forces of evil and obscurantism would fail and that there would be a revival of interest in the history of the castle and its all but vanished faith before the anniversary in 2021.

Looking about myself, however, I couldn't help but wonder if we were really all that was left.

The last of the faithful...

As above: The memorial on the 'Camp de Cremat' commemorating the martyrs who were burned here in 1244
So below: The 'Camp de Cremat' or 'field of the Stake' - still ready for bonfire!!!

Montsegur - 22 June 2010

The crowd had thinned to a desultory handful by the following morning. The skies were clear but it was still bracingly cold. There were no journalists or television crews to keep us company this day in the pre-dawn chill and we shifted from foot to foot as we waited, unsure whether anything would really happen. But it did.

And this time it happened in style...

The Keep - 6.05 am

As soon as the sun appeared above the horizon the first rays began to enter the east-facing arrow slits in the lower chamber of the donjon-keep, marking out a rectangle of light on the inner side of the west-facing slit in the opposing wall...

6.06 am

As the sun climbs higher its rays intensify and the fiery colours visible within the West-facing slit deepen...

And brighten...

6.10 am

By now a second rectangle has appeared in the adjacent arrow slit while three squares of light begin to illuminate the upper reaches of the chamber's Western wall...

The castle is orientated towards the four points of the compass and built on such a strange plan that close study has led to the most unusual theories, including the notion that it was once a 'solar temple'. There is no documentary proof however of any connection between Catharism and sun worship any more than there is with the mythical civilization of lost Atlantis. Moreover, the castle we see today cannot be as it was in 1204 when Raymonde de Perelha, at the request of Esclarmonde de Foix, the venerable high priestess of the Cathar faith, fortified the existing ruins of what may have been a former pagan temple.. After the siege of 1244 the castle was given to the de Levis family who used it to garrison their troops, during which time the structure underwent a number of changes. The mysterious 'solar phenomena' have continued to manifest every year however, weather allowing, with stubborn regularity. Indeed, you could practically set your watch by them...

6.13 am

6.15 am

6.20 am

The yearly light show in the keep is one of the only 'supernatural' phenomena on this haunted Earth courteous enough to not only be repeatable, but to stick to a regular schedule. Strangely enough the report filed by the Groupe de Recherches Archeologique de Montsegur et Environs ( GRAME ) who conducted the definitive archeological survey of the area in 1964 - 1976 concludes only that 'the alleged solar phenomena in the donjon tower have not been scientifically documented, witnessed or verified.

After reaching their apogee at approximately 6.20 the lights in the keep began to fade until by 6.30 no trace remained. As the sun climbed higher and the day warmed we started to believe that maybe summer would return ...

As above, so below: The pog - 6.30 am June 22 2010 ( note suitably dove shaped refraction in the camera lens )

June 23

We decided to have a bit of a lie in, leaving the 'scientific documentation' of the solstice effect to other hands. When we finally got back on our feet we heard from someone that we'd been featured in a slot on the evening news.

June 24

It was a glorious morning. The air was warm and still, almost balmy. At approximately 5.45 we heard a curious metallic sound, a low reverberation that seemed to emanate from the Western wall of the donjon-keep. At first we thought we were alone on the pog and that we truly were the 'last of the faithful', but just as the first rays began to pour through the East-facing arrow slits a wizened old man with a grey beard appeared in the doorway of the tower room. He did not return our greeting and watched in silence from the rear of the chamber as the ' solstice effect' began to manifest once more...

By 6.10 am the tableau in the tower room was much as it had been on the days before. Thanks to the clear skies the glowing rectangles that appeared in the West-facing arrow slits were, if anything, brighter and more clearly defined, their colours more vibrant..

6.13 am - June 23 2010

6.15 am

It has been pointed out that the floorplan of the donjon-keep is reminiscent of the design of early pinhole cameras, a principle that was probably put into practise in Roman, Greek and possibly even bronze age temples long before it was first described by rogue Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in his 'Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae' ( 1646 )

As above: Plate showing diagram of a camera obscura from Kircher's 'Big Book of Light and Shadows'

So below: The floorplan of the donjon-keep

All of which is well and good but it doesn't explain why the castle was built that way, nor does it help us understand quite how it manages to split the light into its component colours in order to achieve those Jack-o-lantern oranges and richly infernal reds...

Normally to pull this kind of thing you'd need a prism. So what gives ?

We stood in silence, gazing wide eyed at this ghostly display, knowing that we were receiving a garbled message from the other side of time whose true meaning might never be known to us. Then at approximately 6.20 am the light began to fade...

Jagged shadows encroached on the dimming rectangles, like the slow, closing bars of a portcullis...

By 6.30 am it was all over.

The old man who had watched passively throughout finally broke the silence asking us in halting English whether we had ever been there for the winter solstice when the rising sun shines through the longitudinal arrow slit in the North Eastern wall. I told him we hadn't. Last winter the conditions had been just too darned inclement, even for me. The old dude smiled and silently shook his head, venturing no further comment.

As we made our way from the tower room we felt a hot gust of wind against our faces.

And, just like that, summer began...

We wish to thank long term Shadow Theatre Irregular 'Marcoshark' for his welcome donation of a new Lumix and an accompanying Velbon tripod to the Terra Umbra cause, without which this documentation would not have been possible.

To be continued...

The Mark of the Beast

2010-05-21T15:32:00.001-07:00

Previously on 'Terra Umbra' : - Spanish film maker Nacho Cerda joins the team on a visit to Rennes-les-Chateau where a series of strange 'coincidences' cast a disturbing new light on the 'bloodline' conspiracy and the identity of the so-called 'black magician' prowling the Zone...

The Zone – May 2010

The three saints of ice have finally packed their bags and headed south. The first breath of summer has touched the high pastures of the Ariege and the fallen trees, downed by the freak storm a couple of weeks ago ( * see previous 'blog ) have been dragged away and cut up for firewood. The cavaliers des faidits Cathare have already left on their yearly trek from Montsegur to Mirepoix and the crème de la crème of the European film industry, their stars, producers, entertainment lawyers and various hangers on have descended locust like on the French Riviera to bask in the gaudy, reflected light of the Cannes festival where lies are bought and sold by the yard like roughspun cloth. The assembled glitterati have little idea that behind the gleaming facade of the croisette another world awaits – an older, darker world where the fairytales of the horror movie business still have very real currency.

A mere two hours from downtown Cannes the tiny village of Rennes les Chateau stirs in May sunshine, awakening from its winter hibernation to shake off the cobwebs and set out its equally dubious wares. Ever since the emergence of the 'sacred bloodline' theory outlined in books such as 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail' and 'The DaVinci Code', Rennes has found itself at the centre of a labyrinth of hoaxes and conspiracy theories that continues to ramify to this day.

“These people here, they're like extras in a Mario Bava movie” whispered Nacho, leaning a little closer to Miss Scarlett, eyes casting nervously from side to side at the other denizens of Le Jardin, the outdoor cafe next to Sauniere's domain and the customary meeting place for local mystery hunters. Henry Lincoln had settled in his usual corner with a group of anxious looking pilgrims starting to gather around him eagerly clutching copies off his latest book.

“Just another day on the devil's chessboard.” Miss Scarlett returned Henry's good natured wave.
“But this place is really nice,” said Nacho, relaxing a little in the meridianal sunshine. “At least the locals seem friendly enough.”

“You don't know Rennes,” muttered Miss Scarlett, toying with her sunglasses.

Nacho had driven up from Barcelona to discuss a new feature project only to find himself caught up in a real life supernatural narrative that might have sprung from the plot line of one of his own movies. We had last worked together in 2006 on the screenplay for Nacho's directorial feature debut 'Los Abandonados/ The Abandoned' a supernatural thriller concerning an American film producer who encounters her own ghostly doppelganger haunting a time warped farmhouse somewhere deep in the Russian countryside.

As above, so below: Nacho Cerda directs Anastasia Hille and Karel Roden in 'The Abandoned'( 2007 )described by www.esplatter.com/reviews as the 'scariest movie in years'

'The Abandoned' opened wide in theatres all across the States and has since found an appreciative audience among genre fans on both sides of the Atlantic but Nacho and I, while proud of what we had accomplished under the circumstances, remained only too aware of the many compromises we had been forced to make during the project's long and at times painful gestation. This time around we were both determined to retain creative control over our work and craft a terrifying new vision worthy of our mutual talents.

In any event it was a pleasure to see my old comrade again and to find that despite all the water that had gone under the bridge Nacho hadn't changed one bit with all his familiar enthusiasms and obsessions still firmly in place. Miss Scarlett and myself, in turn, took no small pleasure in showing him around the Zone and introducing him to some of its myriad attendant mysteries. Nacho had blown into town the day after the feast of Saint Servais, the last of the 'three saints of Ice' ( * see previous 'blog entry ) and scaled the pog of Montsegur for the first time the following morning.

The walls of the keep were still drying out after the rains that have saturated the area for the last fortnight or so and we watched from the ramparts as the leaden skies finally began to clear over, the hazy, scarcely created landscape of the Zone unfurling itself slowly before our eyes, the misty treetops rolling away and away, seemingly to the very ends of the earth itself. For now at least the castle's weird energies lay dormant and the courtyard and adjoining tower room that had been the setting of so many wonders, terrors and strange encounters over the years gone by seemed no more imposing than any other ancient monument. We completed a circuit of the ruins before leaving the mountaintop to the first straggling tourists of the season and starting back down into the world in search of a hot cup of coffee and a goat's cheese salad.

The next stop on the magical, mystery tour was, quite naturally, the Rennes plateau where a series of unsettling surprises lay in store. The Aude valley was a few degrees warmer than the Ariege albeit a good deal windier and we watched from the Belvedere as the shadows of the clouds scudded across the undulating panoramic landscape that remained every bit as impressive as the day I first set eyes on it more than two decades ago.

“It's like a movie set,” Nacho took in the mock-gothic edifice of the Tour Magdala, his mind working overtime as usual, setting up potential shots and laying out invisible dolly tracks as if on a location recce for a sinister, untitled drama that was somehow writing itself as we walked.

The sky darkened as we left the museum, a malignant early summer squall blowing in from the west, a grey sheet of stinging rain following a moment later. We took the winding trail down from the plateau to find shelter in the home of one of our friends, the hermit of the 'River of Colours'.

A cauldron simmered on a distinctly medieval looking hearth whose embers cast a faint, ruddy glow across the cottage's one room living area, its walls and shelves crammed with maps, hand written grimoires, dismembered barbie dolls and lovingly hoarded movie memorabilia. Nacho settled himself into a chair beside the fire while we chatted with our friend about how cold and long the winter had been, the coldest apparently since 1938 although he insisted that '84 had been even worse.

Then Nacho spotted an unused cinema ticket pinned above the hearth.

“You're going to freak out when you see this” he said, shaking his head in disbelief .

The ticket was for a screening of our old buddy Karim Hussain's 'La Belle Bete' which we had attended at the Sitges film festival in southern Spain some three years previously. Karim had been the first writer to work on Nacho's 'Los Abandonados', originating the screenplay that I'd overhauled during the frantic shoot in Bulgaria and the project's typically tempestuous post-production back in Barcelona. A dog eared business card was tucked against the wall beside it bearing the name and telephone number of 'Fangoria' magazine's former editor Tony Timpone.

“But how is this possible?” Nacho looked dumbfounded.

“I found it in a bottle out by the stone ring,” said the hermit.”Somebody must have left it for me. I don't know why.”

“Our friend is a big horror movie fan,” I offered, as if this were somehow an explanation in itself. Retrieving a copy of David Schmoeller's 1979 0pus 'Tourist Trap' from amidst the detritus of DVD's strewn among the doll parts Nacho immediately came across another disc slipped into its sleeve – a French language dub of my very own 'Dust Devil'.

“Damn. I wasn't expecting to see that here...”

“Where else but in Rennes?” mused Miss Scarlett, drawing our host's attention to the disc's credits.

“You made this?” It was the hermit's turn to look surprised as he took on board the bizarre fact that I was the writer director of the film he had only just watched. “I like this film very much!”

“Yeah. I made it all right...” I narrowed my eyes trying to puzzle out the different coincidences and connections. It was so typical of Rennes where people either seemed to be constantly burying and hiding things before leaving behind flamboyant, tell-tale clues.

In the last year there had been a rash of incidents where graffiti has mysteriously appeared on the crosses in the locality. Someone was changing the 'N' in 'INRI', the inscription exoterically to mean 'Jesus of Nazareth - King of the Jews' or esoterically 'Igne Natura Renovatur Integra' ( 'through fire nature is reborn whole' ), to the runic symbol of 'dagaz' ( above ) – the glorious light of the creator. A host of rumours surrounded the mysterious author of these ad hoc insignia. Some believed it was the work of a 'black magician' seeking to subtly manipulate the hypothetical grids of telluric energy running through the area to his ( or her ) own nefarious ends. Others hinted darkly that it might be somehow linked to the resurgence of the movement known as the 'Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple' ( or 'O.T.S' ) in the Rennes region.

The 'O.T.S' was founded in 1952 by the French author Jacques Breyer who based his plans for the Order upon the modern myth of the continuing existence of the Knights Templar. The Orders aims were apparently to prepare humanity for the Second Coming of Christ as a 'solar god-king'. The movement's activities were a mix of early Protestant Christianity mixed with New Age philosophy , using adapted Masonic rituals as well as drawing inspiration for its teachings from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the British occultist Aleister Crowley who headed the Order of Oriental Templars ( OTO ).

The movement was revived in Geneva in 1984 by Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret and lodges were established in Quebec as well as in France, Austria, Switzerland and Martinique, attracting a number of wealthy and influential members, including Princess Grace of Monaco who was reputedly initiated into the movement shortly before her death. The group's initiatory ceremonies included expensive purchases, jewellery, costumes, regalia and the payment of initiation fees. During ceremonies members wore crusader-type robes and were to hold in awe a sword which Di Mambro claimed was an authentic Templar artefact, given to him in a previous incarnation a thousand years ago.

In October 1994 Tony Dutoit's infant son, Emmanuel Dutoit, aged three months, was killed at the group's centre in Morin Heights, Quebec. The baby had been stabbed repeatedly with a wooden stake. It is believed that Di Mambro ordered the murder, because he had identified the baby as the Anti-Christ whom he believed had been born into the order to prevent him from succeeding in his spiritual aims. A few days later, Di Mambro and twelve followers performed a ritual last supper before embarking of a spate of simultanious murders and mass suicides in Switzerland, and Quebec — 15 inner circle members committed suicide with poison, 30 were killed by bullets or smothering, and 8 others were killed by other causes. Many of the bodies when found were drugged, possibly to prevent the members from objecting. The buildings were then set on fire by timer devices, purportedly as one last symbol of the group's purification. 48 human beings perished in the wholesale slaughter that took place in Sion, Switzerland, where a number of the dead were found in a secret underground chapel lined with mirrors and other items of Templar symbolism. The bodies were dressed in the order's ceremonial robes and laid out in a circle with their feet together and their heads outward. Most of the dead had had plastic bags tied over their faces before being shot in the head. It is believed that the plastic bags were a symbol of the ecological disaster that would befall the human race after the OTS members moved on to Sirius. Farewell letters left by the deceased cult members stated that they believed they were leaving to escape the "hypocrisies and oppression of this world."

A mayor, a journalist, a civil servant and a sales manager were among the victims in Switzerland and records seized by the Quebec police showed that some members had personally donated over $1 million to the group's leader Joseph Di Mambro. There was also another attempted mass suicide of the remaining members which was thwarted in the late 1990s. All the suicide/murders and attempts occurred around the dates of the equinoxes and solstices in accordance with the beliefs of the group. In 1997 a small house exploded into flames in Saint-Casimir, Quebec, leaving behind a further five charred bodies for the police to pull from the rubble. Three teenagers aged 13, 14 and 16, the children of one of the couples that died in the fire, were discovered in a shed behind the house, alive but heavily drugged.

Michael Tabachnik an internationally renowned Swiss musician and conductor, was arrested as a leader of the Solar Temple in the late 1990s and indicted for "participation in a criminal organization," and murder. He came to trial in Grenoble, France during the spring of 2001 and was acquitted. French prosecutors appealed the verdict and an appellate court ordered a second trial beginning on October 24, 2006. He was again cleared less than two months later on December 20 and rumours began to circulate shortly afterwards that the movement had joined forces with the OTO in the Rennes area where they have apparently tried to seize control of several properties in including an abandoned hotel and stables overlooking the plateau where I had lodged on my first visit to the Zone.

The recent plague esoteric graffiti that has begun to crop up in the area first came to our attention in the spring of 2008 when Miss Scarlett and myself noticed a curious geometric sign cut into a rock just below the summit of Mount Bugarach.

At the time we took it as a good omen, having already chosen the symbol - the eight pointed 'Star of Isis' or 'Rosette of Innana' - as the principal leitmotif around which the 'TERRA UMBRA' site and its attendant portals are designed...

Approximately twelve months later I noticed that an identical sigil had been freshly cut into the back of the Devil's Armchair in Rennes les Bains...

At face value this would seem logical enough. The seat, carved out of a boulder in an isolated glade near the source of the Madeleine, has after all been frequently referred to in modern day guide books as the 'Throne of Isis'. There is however little evidence to suggest that this appellation predates the publication of a very weird little book entitled 'GENISIS' ( 1985 ) in which the retired British surveyor and cartographer David Wood attempted to transpose the iconography of the Egyptian creation myth to the Zone's topography. Mount Bugarach and the Devil's Armchair both play a significant role in Wood's byzantine calculations which make great play out of the pattern of the tiles found on the floor of Boudet's church in Rennes les Bains - a familiar eight pointed configuration that the author rather melodramatically dubs the 'Sigil of the Beast'.

Despite our best efforts none of us here at Shadow Theatre HQ can find any existing esoteric rationale behind Wood's conflation of the 'Star of Isis' with the so-called sign of the Beast outside of his own fanciful private cosmology. Mount Bugarach seems particularly dear to the author's heart, forming one of the cardinal points on his eponymous pentagram and according to our friend, the hermit of the 'River of Colours' an identical 'octogram' has recently turned up carved into a rock near Peyrolles, the head of the vague squiggly shaped formation identified by Wood as 'Le Serpent Rouge.'

Wood seems intent on trying to define some abstract ( and at times rather graphically Freudian ) notion of the 'Goddess' through the rules and measures of conventional geometry to arrive at a sort of 'divinity by numbers'. His work, fuelled by what might be described as 'cartoerotic' mania, helped establish the notion of the Rennes pentagram back in the eighties and has undeniably helped shape our modern perception of the so-called 'mystery'. It appears however that someone is now deliberately trying to change the facts on the ground to fit the specifics of Wood's theory. According to the rumours one of Wood's former associates was apparently behind the recent outbreak of unprovoked sigil carving, possibly in an attempt to set up another phony twist in the mystery.

On our last visit to the grotto of Saint Antoine in Galamus gorge we couldn't help noticing that someone had tampered with the puzzle box, altering the 'N' to form another 'dagaz' rune.

Monsieur 'X' was at work again...

Our hermit friend smiled knowingly, “ That's him. He's been very busy. You can always tell his work, he the one who changes the N in INRI, to make the rune dagaz for day. He is very clever and he has been using this shape.” He quickly sketched out the star of Isis.

“He's the one who's been carving those! First on Bugarach. Then the Devil's Armchair. He seems to be marking out all the points on the pentagram from 'Genisis'...”

“Yes, that's the book that he is working from.”

“But why? To rewrite the mythology? To make the mystery fit?”

“It is the mark of the beast.”

“What?”

“You must understand there are people here, very well connected and powerful people from the O.T.O and the O.T.S, who have come together to make their own cult. They would like to take over this place and use it for their own purposes...”

“But...”

“There's a lot of bodies around here...”

Nacho had been listening intently, “I told you this place was like living in an Mario Bava movie.”

The rain had stopped . Digging through a pile of horror magazines our hermit friend retrieved an old issue of the French genre periodical 'Mad Movies' carrying a cover story on 'los Abandonados/The Abandoned' ( 2006 ) which Nacho duly signed for him. The fact that he just happened to have a copy on hand no longer surprised us. On departure our friend pressed a copy of 2008 pseudodocumentary entitled 'BLOODLINE' into our hands and we promised to take a look at it before returning it to him the next time he came up to Montsegur, the fact that Karim Hussein's initial draft for Nacho's 'Los Abandonados' was itself provisionally entitled 'BLOODLINE' just one more 'coincidence' in a seemingly endless chain of baffling synchronicity. Typical, really. Pure essence of Rennes.

Bruce Burgess's film purports to follow the real life escapades of self proclaimed 'tomb raider' Ben Hammot as he unearths a series of bottles buried at strategic locations in the Rennes area which apparently contain coded parchments written by Berenger Sauniere himself, a string of clues that are ultimately supposed to point the way to the tomb of Mary Magdalene. We couldn't help noticing the by now all too familiar 'dagaz' rune appeared on several of the parchments. The scrolls in question, in all honesty, didn't appear particularly old. Moreover one of the key clues in the 'Bloodline' scavenger hunt revolves around a chest containing a handful of old coins and other sacred relics unearthed from the floor of the 'Grotto of the Magdalene', a location already extensively excavated by numerous treasure hunters back in the eighties and early nineties, myself included. ( * see 'LACHRYMAE – Chapter 15: All roads lead to Rennes - http://shadowtheatre13.com/thethreemothers15.html )

Below: Self in the Villa Bethanie - photograph by Nacho Cerda

“Looks like Monsieur 'X' has been keeping busy,” Miss Scarlett narrowed her eyes, hitting the pause button.

“Yeah, but what does he want? What does he hope to gain from all this?”

“I don't know. Maybe he's working for the Tourist board. I mean how else did they get the keys to the church?”

I thought it over for a moment. It wouldn't be the first time a minister of tourism had been caught burying ancient artefacts in the Rennes area. Antonin Gadal ( below ) was apparently caught doing precisely that in the early part of the twentieth century – buying up jade Egyptians ornaments at museum auctions and secreting them in the caves of the Lombrive to be publicly exhumed at a later date.

“Probably just trying to rewrite history or get a publishing deal. Like everyone else.”

“It'd take more than one person to pull off something that elaborate.”

“It wouldn't be the first secret society to try and capitalize on the success of the 'DaVinci Code'. Remember how Opus Dei's membership sky rocketed after the film's initial release? When was this thing released anyhow?"

I keyed in the film's title, checking the internet database. “2008”

“There you go. Dan Brown meets the Santilli Roswell autopsy footage”

“Yeah. But something about it still doesn't add up.” I frowned, turning the disc in my hands. “I mean secret societies don't generally feel the need to advertise and only the film makers stand to reap any benefit.from the disc itself. The only reason to deliberately lay a false trail would be to either hide something in plain sight or take the heat off whatever's really going on.”

“So, what is going on?”

“I dunno. We'll just have to wait and see what else Monsieur 'X' has up his sleeve.” I crossed to the window, looking out over the darkened treetops. It had been a weird enough run of events but then nothing is ever really too weird for Rennes, where 'coincidences' are commonplace and conspiracies a way of life. Somewhere out in the dark an owl hooted as if in agreement. “My guess is we'll find out soon enough...”

Miss Scarlett was busy rummaging through the numerous shelves of the library. “Where's that Best of Bava box kit? And where the hell is the other bag of popcorn?”

To be continued...

The Three Saints of Ice

2010-05-05T06:36:00.000-07:00

Previously on 'Terra Umbra' - the team experiences unexpected temporal phenomena during a nocturnal vigil in the heart of the mountain. Meanwhile, a freak storm closes the pass, cutting off all communication with the village...

Montsegur – April 28 - 2010

From the private journal of Scarlett Amaris

Finding our way down the darkened path was not so easy. The moonlight streaming through the dense branches made the terrain seem strangely altered and not a little confusing. We descended slowly and carefully before parting the shadowy branches to find ourselves once more at the 'roc du coeur'.

As above: Moon rise over the summit of Bidorta - April 28 - 9.30 pm
So below: Hare Moon over Montsegur -April 29 - 3.00 am

The dead do not rest so easily here and it was the first time in a very long while that I have actually felt fear on the mountain. There was a desolate blackness in that space between the two rocks which during the day had seemed so powerful and holy. I hung back for a moment, not wanting to come into contact with whatever was waiting there. Closing my eyes I crossed through and quickly scrambled up the boulders on the other side to higher ground. We situated ourselves on the highest rock and lit a few candles. Even those small flickers of light could not ease the sense of anxiety that was plaguing me, the need to flee and run back to the safety of the castle.

A thousand ambivalent eyes watched us from the shadows. There were scuffling noises and then the sound of footsteps running away ( two feet – not four although I tried to rationalize it as some kind of animal at first). A branch snapped loudly nearby and then I heard the footsteps running again. Richard went back into the place between the rocks to investigate and I elected to stay and watch the gear on the vantage point. The moon was steadily climbing towards the other side of the mountain and I mused on how difficult it was going to be to find our way back through the dense forest, over the spiny defences to the chateau. It had been my idea to come here on the full moon, and irrationally at that moment I wished that I was anywhere else. It wasn't that I was scared that something truly bad would happen, or that I would be faced with some supernatural phenomena but rather it was knowing that something breathed there, something so old and forgotten that it could not take shape in my mind...

Richard appeared from the darkness.

“All quiet”

“Do you get the feeling that there is something here that might be better left alone..?”

“Whatever the hell it is, it's gone now. At least for the moment ...”

Realizing that the moon was over the castle we started back up the pog. I clambered up the narrow, all but invisible path as quickly as possible and never once glanced back, keeping my eyes glued firmly on the rocky trail in front of me. It was only when I reached the ruined dwellings just above the treeline that I felt I could breathe again.

The courtyard was filled with brilliant moonlight. I walked through the door into this transformed kingdom to come into direct contact with a strangely warm patch of air. It was tactile enough to be able to feel around the edges of it. I stepped away as Richard came through the door and ran smack into the same thing, raising his hand in wonder.

“Can you feel this?”

“I know, I did the exact same thing. It seems to stop over here...”

Other people had described this exact same phenomena before, but this was the first time that I had experienced it. At first I thought that it was something to do with the stones in the keep, but as we wandered away from the walls, we keep running into these tropical 'window area's' approximately every five feet or so which gave a new meaning to playing the game 'hot' and 'cold'. Then the whispering began. It's was a young woman's voice who was speaking very rapidly. We both turned our heads towards the dunjeon room where it seemed to be coming from. It wasn't loud enough to discern any words and the sound rose and fell as if carried by a non-existent wind.

The voice was oddly reassuring. Despite everything we somehow belonged there, safe and secure in the darkness of the early thirteenth century. Whoever she was that whispered to us from the shadows of the castle walls seemed to co-exist with us, with our time and our world. Perhaps on some level she was still human, just as we are but whatever lives beneath the 'Roc du Coer' is dead or perhaps was never alive to begin with. Perhaps it was a place where people went when they were sick, or where they went to die, to become part of the mountain. After we found the path up the sheer face of the pog and that strange, silent avenue of stones we all experienced disorientating and at times disturbing dreams. It was nothing that we could readily see with our naked eyes or apprehend with our waking senses but I think we all felt it in our hearts...

Extracts from private weblog of Richard Stanley

Montsegur – May 1 - 2010

One world and then another, running like the frames in a strip of film or the links in an endless chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plods just ahead like two dogs walking in each other's tracks in the snow. Like a long, endless row of ball bearings running down a groove, almost touching but not quite. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is tomorrow and the future is the past. Except, according to Dr. Stephen Hawking, there is no past, at least no past that we can reach, save for the figment of remembrance that flits like an eager, night-winged, bat in the fading shadows of our minds.

It's enough, I suppose, that Dr, Hawking reversed his thinking to admit the possibility of time travel to begin with, although he currently subscribes to the notion that time only flows one way, which explains why our paradigm is not already overrun by chrononauts from the future, neatly sidestepping the paradoxical possibility of changing the present by physically interfering with the past and altering the flow of events at source. Na Esclamonda and the castle's other defenders might be able to reach out to us through the mists of time, but, according to the good doctor, we cannot reach back to help them. We cannot step across that invisible line that separates one world from the next.

It has been seven hundred and seventy-seven years since the fall of Montsegur. Seven hundred and seventy-seven worlds stepping in one another's tracks. Although, it would be more than that, if I understand Dr. Hawking's words correctly. A world a day three hundred and sixty-five times seven hundred and seventy-seven. Or maybe one world a minute, or even one world a second. A second is a thick thing, thick enough to separate two worlds. Three hundred and sixty-five times seven hundred and seventy-seven times twenty-four times sixty times sixty. And yet, somewhere in time she lives. Somewhere a field of daisies raise their heads to the bright, spring sunshine. Na Esclarmonda lives and the beautiful Pelegrina de Bruniquel still walks between the rows of her vegetable patch with her water can in hand, somewhere just beyond our sense's further wall...

Once upon a time Bel fires, named in honour of the Gaulish deities Belenos ( 'bright one' ) and his consort Belisama or Belisenna, would have been lit on every high hill in the land on May eve to mark the 'cross-quarter day', the mid-point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice when the herds of livestock were driven out to their summer pastures and mountain grazing lands. Accordingly on Walpurgisnacht we made our way to the highest vista in the village, a forbidding crag known as 'Hannibal's Point' where the famed Carthaginian general and his retinue of elephants is said to have crossed the mountains in days of old. A few minutes before the witching hour a strange, half luminous fog rolled in across the rooftops, filling the valley below like a bowl of dry ice in a black metal music video. Within seconds the landscape seemed utterly transformed, the outlines of the trees and buildings becoming vague and dreamlike, their distant lights splintering into murky, prismatic beams.

For a while we stood stock still, gazing in wonder at the etherial panorama that unfurled before us. Then a cold wind blew in from the high pastures of the Thabor and we recalled Our Lady of the Snows and the story of the 'Three Saints of Ice' or 'Seins de Glace'.

The first of the triad, Saint Mamert was an obscure Viennese archbishop who died in 475 whilst St. Pancras, the best known of the three, was a Roman martyr, beheaded in the year 304 for his Christian beliefs when he was a mere fourteen years of age and who is accordingly celebrated as a saint for children as well as the namesake of one of London's largest and busiest railway terminals. The martyr's body was apparently covered in balsam before being interred in a sepulcher in the catacombs of Rome while his head was placed in a reliquary that still exists today in the basilica of San Pancrazio.

Along with Saint Servais or Servatius ( above ), the first bishop of Maastricht who brought Christianity to the Low Countries after ordering a church to be built over a Roman temple to Fortuna and Jupiter, the trio are jointly known as the 'Ice Saints' whose feast days fall respectively on the 11th, 12th and 13^th of May, or at least they did until the Catholic church supposedly disavowed them for being a little too pagan. Their reign coincides with what is commonly known as the 'Pink Moon' or 'lune rousse', a word derived from “roussir” which means to turn brown, marking a period when nocturnal temperatures can plummet, spelling death to seedlings and fragile young plants.

Above: Self with Beltane Fire Society founder Mark Oxbrow - circa 1995

Back in the day when I was still dressing up as a orc and designing and executing pyrotechnic displays for the Beltane Fire Society whose yearly gatherings on Edinburgh's Carlton hill involved a good three hundred scantily clad or near naked performers, drawing crowds of fifteen thousand or more, we used to take pride in the fact that our May eve celebrations were never derailed by rain or wind whereas the Druid's solstice sun wheel ceremony at Stonehenge was habitually drenched despite taking place a lot further south and a good two months later in the calender. Mother Nature always seemed to provide the Beltane crew with an appropriate weather window, a brief respite from the cold ( described by American horror author Stephen King as a 'strawberry spring', a 'false spring' or 'lying spring' ) before turning nasty again and blasting the very buds from the trees. At the time we kidded ourselves into believing that perhaps we were doing something right and our gaudy offerings had been accepted by the goddess but the sad wisdom that comes with age tells me that the clement conditions we experienced year after year had more to do with our fortuitous timing in relationship to the earth’s annual orbital trajectory which passes thereafter through a thick band of cosmic dust that may or may not be left over from the formation of the planets, rather than any hypothetical divine blessing.

Shortly after midnight we began to feel the first drops of rain against our faces and by dawn it had become a downpour. Yet despite the abrupt turn in the weather we were far from being the only celebrants abroad that night. In the cold light of day we came across a damp ring of embers beside the crossroads at Morenci, in the shade of the jagged rock known as 'Dentilhero', the natural spur that crowns the forested crest that rises to the northeast of the pog, which, in all probability, served in ancient times as a place of worship dedicated to the sun god Belenos himself. ( * see 'The Hand of Morenci' ) By the time we reached the hilltop whoever had lit the fire was long gone and we couldn't help wondering whether or not similar beacons had blazed atop Cardou, Canigou, Bugarach and Bidorta. The Beltane fog had simply been too thick for us to be able to see anything beyond the immediate confines of our valley.

Last week we were happily basking in the full heat of the Meridianal sun and have the tan lines to prove it but by this morning the snow outside our front door lay a good two feet deep and is still falling thick and fast as I write. The trees, already laden with their spring leaves, can scarcely bear the weight of the gathering snow and seem to be taking nose dives left, right and centre. While strolling in the fields above the Lasset this morning we watched as one of the listing trunks gave way and fell heavily across the path not a hundred yards from us as if it had been torn from its roots by some invisible behemoth. Another tree toppled across the power lines, abruptly plunging the entire village into freezing blackness.

As above: Miss Scarlett and Jericho - the secret ruler of Montsegur

So below: All work and no play makes Richard a dull boy...

Both the cell and land lines have been cut and we spent much of the afternoon crouched beside Madame Couquet's hearth, warming ourselves by the light of a dismembered chair and a couple of logs dragged up from the store room. After spending most of my life wishing I were back in the dark ages it comes as a bracing reminder of just how brutal life can be without the creature comforts of the 21^st century. The wind races in the eaves and a shingle rattles as the wind marches across the roof with tripping, dancing feet. The pass is closed and we huddle closer to the embers as the fireplace talks with its sooty throat of other days, of other folk and other winds while outside the streets of Montsegur lie silent, wrapped in the chilly, choking embrace of the three Saints of Ice...

To be continued...

Into the Heart of the Mountain

2010-04-21T08:06:00.000-07:00

April 19 2010

Johnny Redhead crossed to the brink of the abyss, staring out over the winding gorge of the Lasset far below. Scarlett and J.B. slid down the scree behind me as I paused to catch my breath, slowly taking in my surroundings.

Above: Master climber Johnny Redhead with village mascot 'Tiger IV'

Scrambling hand over hand up a bare rockface wasn't what we'd had in mind that morning, but it came naturally to Johnny Redhead. Johnny had founded the free climbing movement on Montserrat back in the day and was no stranger to the haute Pyrenee's. This was his third visit to Montsegur. He'd had plenty of time to scope out the terrain and now the early spring weather finally provided us with the perfect window of opportunity.

We first heard the rumours about the secret path up the sheer side of the pog during the shooting of 'The Secret Glory' in the summer of 1998. Indeed such rumours are hard to miss, repeated, as they are, in virtually every guide book and work of history or 'pseudohistory' to mention the castle's siege. The basic story has it that after holding out for ten months against the crusaders, the fortress fell to treachery. Accounts tend to differ as to who sold them out, but the basic consensus seems to be that a shepherd, possibly from the village of Camon, guided a group of variously described as 'Gascon mercenaries', or 'Teutonic knights accustomed to the alpine conditions', up the sheer side of the mountain via a precipitous 'secret path'. The defenders were caught off guard and either killed or wounded before being flung to their deaths from the top of the cliff. A chronicler relates that at sunrise the raiding party looked down in horror at the dizzying drop and swore that they never would have made the ascent by daylight. The route that they had taken was 'far too terrifying'...

It is widely believed that Pierre Roger de Mirepoix saved the treasures of the castle by hiding four parfaits in a crack in the rocks, and that during the night of the 15^th of March, the very eve of the castle's capitulation, they were lowered down the sheer cliff face by ropes and made good their escape. There is little or no historical documentation however to support this popular account which made its first appearance in Napoleon Peyrat's 'Histoire des Albigeoise', 1870. Peyrat was a visionary, Protestant pastor who descended from a long line of religious dissedents that seemed to have held an multi-generational grudge against the Catholic church (see previous blog 'Secrets of the Oppidum') and who apparently saw the events happen in a dream. Despite it's shaky roots, this fable has formed the roots of any number of conspiracy theories from 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail' (Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh, 1982) to Colonel Howard Buchner's 'Emerald Cup – Ark of Gold', 1991, and is believed by some to have inspired certain elements of Lawrence Kasden's screenplay, 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'.

Above: Self with ballista ammunition from the crusader catapults (catalogued and numbered by the GRAME -Groupe de Recherches Archeologiques de Montsegur et Environs), pictured during an initial survey of the pog's eastern flank - circa 1998 ( photograph courtesy of James 'J.B.' Bourne )

Unsurprisingly, the matter of whether or not the secret paths actually existed has been a matter of some debate here at Shadow Theatre HQ. Long-term Irregular, James 'J.B.' Bourne, and myself made our first attempts to pick up the trail back in the mid nineties. Although well intentioned, our early efforts were thwarted time and again. Every trail that we followed seemed to disappear into the rocks and the cliffs, forcing us to turn back crest fallen and empty-handed. At this stage of the game, some fifteen years further down the pike, it was pretty much a matter of do or die.

Gritting our collective teeth we followed Johnny Redhead up the narrow incline towards the waiting cliffs. It was already close to mid-day and the best part of the climb was still ahead of us.

“This is definitely a path.” He called back confidently.

“Yeah. But was it made by humans or animals?” I craned my neck upwards, doing my best to follow his eye line.

Something crashed heavily through the bushes far below.

“Probably a wild boar that we scared off.” J.B. offered in response to our questioning faces.

“I can understand why men climb mountains. But animals?”

“Didn't Thierre say to watch out for vipers?” interjected Miss Scarlett “That they've just woken up and are at their hungriest and deadliest this time of year..”

“Yeah. But why do animals climb bloody mountains?”

“I dunno. Maybe the boars get together to play poker in the keep”

We worked our way slowly higher, eyes fixed on a gap in the ridge ahead. We hit more dense scrub which we had to crawl through and then bare rock. It was a tough call which one was more difficult. The scrub clawed at our clothes and faces whilst on the rock we could only pray for hand and foot holds. We inched our way up the south eastern wall of the pog in a rising traverse, ascending cautiously from ledge to ledge, trying not to look down.

As above, so below: UP! ( photographs courtesy of Scarlett Amaris and James Bourne )
Sadly we didn't get any pics of the climb itself as we were all too busy hanging on for dear life to bother taking happysnaps.

Slowly the landscape took on a different aspect as unseen crests, troughs and valleys opened beneath us. A few hundred meters higher Scarlett missed a foothold, sliding abruptly downwards only to catch herself at the last moment. J.B. winced hearing the fearful sound of the pebbles dislodged by her feet trickling away into the gulfs below.

“You're a good little scamperer.” commented Johnny, plainly in his element.

“How much further to the top?” Ashen faced Miss Scarlett heaved herself over the lip of the spur.

“It's so close that I can smell it!” Johnny grinned, sniffing the warm, sweet breeze that blew down from the pog.

“Up...” I grunted, following him as he began to climb once more, not knowing exactly why, only knowing that I had to. Vertigo coursed through me but there was something within me that was stronger than fear that only seemed to deepen as I climbed, the desire to solve the mountain's riddle and penetrate to a still deeper layer of the enigma, to somehow find my way back through the maze to the good lady's side and wherever the hell it was I really belonged, my limbs going through the motions of an built in ritual that kept them moving long after the pilot had taken his hands from the joystick.

As above, so below: Spring colors on the south eastern face of the pog ( photographs courtesy of James 'J.B.' Bourne )

“Damn. That's perfect...” I exclaimed, eyes focussing on the foliage that ringed the cliff top. “The mountain's crowned by wild roses.”

“Yeah. I just put my f****n' hand on one of 'em” Miss Scarlett shrugged, displaying her punctured palm.

We stopped for a minute letting the realization sink in that we had made it.

We were finally standing upright on the summit of the pog. Large, alpine fir trees stood majestically towards the sunshine. This was a part of the mountain that none of us had ever been to before and the territory was wild, virginal and untouched, with the castle no where in sight.

It didn't take long to come across a trebuchet ball, a large one fired by the crusaders so long ago, still lying on the forest floor. Evidently a fierce battle had been fought here during the closing days of the siege.

Johnny paused, hackles rising.“The hell is this place ?”
Up ahead the path dipped into a shadowy hollow between two huge, moss encrusted boulders.“The place between two stones...” I muttered.“I think it was mentioned in one of the inquisition records. There's a brief but puzzling reference to how when Arnaud Narbona de Carol was was mortally injured they took him 'dans la grotte de ce chateau' although its said this might not have been a cave at all but only a “place between two stones”.

“There's something down here all right.” Johnny raised his arm, short hairs standing on end as if divining something just beyond the limit of our senses.

“This feels like the oldest part of the mountain,” whispered Miss Scarlett, dipping her voice as if we had just entered a place of worship, and, in a way, we had.

“Older than the castle?”

She nodded, eyes scanning the sky line beyond the treetops as she slowly got her bearings. “It's the same feeling I had at Morenci. Like the two places are connected somehow. Aligned. Like the sun and the moon...”

I started forward into the shadows, recalling a story about another place between two stones. The crack in the rocks where Pierre Roger de Mirepoix was supposed to have hidden those fleeing holy men and their sacred treasure. But that was surely a myth, the dream of a deranged 19^th century pastor yet the silent, shadowy aisle of stones at the head of the path seemed to fit that myth's murky outlines only too comfortably.

As we searched the maze of ancient boulders it became more evident that parts of this eldritch sanctuary had been apparently been shaped by human hands, smaller stones stacked over the larger ones, creating unusual shapes and alcoves. The rock seemed strangely porous, and the ground was so damp and soft that my stick sunk in a good two feet at one point. I hesitated, skin tingling despite the warmth of the afternoon, knowing I had come to the edge of something I could scarcely comprehend.

Before us a dark cavity gaped amidst the maw of the rocks. Falling to my hands and knees in the deep, rich mulch of the forest floor I squirmed forward, getting my head and shoulders through the gap. It was about as far as I could go but it was enough. There was an oddly shaped hollow within the bosom of the stone through which the sun's rays streamed and for a moment it was as if I were staring into the heart of the mountain itself.

As above, so below: Sacre Coeur

We emerged, breathless and a little giddy, from the tree line below the stone terrace that Miss Scarlett had investigated only a few days previously in the company of our shaman friend. ( * see previous 'blog – 'Secrets of the Oppidum' ) Now we realized the terrace formed a convenient marker, pointing the way towards the stones beyond and the path that lead down the south eastern face of the pog, a trail we have decided to name 'La Route du Coeur'.

As above, so below: La Route du Coeur

There are many ways to climb the holy mountain some more difficult than others. A winding path, almost certainly used by the crusaders, ascends the northern slope, connecting the ford at Benaix to the Roc de la Tour, and there are persistent rumours concerning a hidden trail on the seemingly impassable western flank. Every time we gain some incremental insight into the mystery it is as if consensus reality is forced to concede for a moment, and we are handed another tiny piece of the puzzle. Slowly, bit by bit a larger, older truth begins to fall into place.

“I can't believe we finally did it!” J.B. Stretched out on the embankment beneath the castle wall, soaking up the sun and enjoying the sensation of being back on solid terra firma.”After all these years...”

“Yeah,” I inclined my head, looking down into the valley far below, watching the backs of the eagles turning over the soft green hills where Esclarmonde d'Alion once rode. “After all these years...”
“Sometimes all it takes is a li'l chance and a li'l will. That and the right company.” I nodded towards Johnny who stood on the edge of the cliff, gazing towards the dim, volcanic outline of Bugarach that rose tier upon Babelian tier on the easternmost rim of the earth, his head already aswim with thoughts of climbs to come and fresh trails to blaze.

“Some people say when you climb a mountain don't look down. But why not? The view is beautiful...” - Viktor Suvorov ( Soviet tank commander )

To be continued: -

Previously on 'Terra Umbra' – After twenty years of frustration and near misses, the team seems to be on the verge of finally cracking the mystery as free-climbing guru, Johnny Redhead, galvanizes efforts to find the secret path up the sheer face of the pog. Typically however, the solution to this long running riddle only leads to a further enigma ...

April 19 2010

The trail leading back down towards the village through the tangled thickets of box and scrub myrtle looked almost as forbidding as the way forward, a barely distinguishable path, seemingly more suited to animals than to mere mortals such as ourselves, that threaded its course steadily higher up the beetling cliffs. We'd gone too far for turning back to be a viable option. The only way left to go was up...

Above: Master climber Johnny Redhead with village mascot 'Tiger IV'

Scrambling hand over hand up a bare rockface wasn't what we'd had in mind that morning, but it came naturally to Johnny Redhead. Johnny had founded the free climbing movement on Montserrat back in the day and was no stranger to the haute Pyrenee's. This was his third visit to Montsegur. He'd had plenty of time to scope out the terrain and now the early spring weather finally provided us with the perfect window of opportunity.

We first heard the rumours about the secret path up the sheer side of the pog during the shooting of 'The Secret Glory' in the summer of 1998. Indeed such rumours are hard to miss, repeated, as they are, in virtually every guide book and work of history or 'pseudohistory' to mention the castle's siege. The basic story has it that after holding out for ten months against the crusaders, the fortress fell to treachery. Accounts tend to differ as to who sold them out, but the basic consensus seems to be that a shepherd, possibly from the village of Camon, guided a group of variously described as 'Gascon mercenaries', or 'Teutonic knights accustomed to the alpine conditions', up the sheer side of the mountain via a precipitous 'secret path'. The defenders were caught off guard and either killed or wounded before being flung to their deaths from the top of the cliff. A chronicler relates that at sunrise the raiding party looked down in horror at the dizzying drop and swore that they never would have made the ascent by daylight. The route that they had taken was 'far too terrifying'...

Gritting our collective teeth we followed Johnny Redhead up the narrow incline towards the waiting cliffs. It was already close to mid-day and the best part of the climb was still ahead of us.

“This is definitely a path.” He called back confidently.

“Yeah. But was it made by humans or animals?” I craned my neck upwards, doing my best to follow his eye line.

Something crashed heavily through the bushes far below.

“Probably a wild boar that we scared off.” J.B. offered in response to our questioning faces.

“I can understand why men climb mountains. But animals?”

“Didn't Thierre say to watch out for vipers?” interjected Miss Scarlett “That they've just woken up and are at their hungriest and deadliest this time of year..”

“Yeah. But why do animals climb bloody mountains?”

“I dunno. Maybe the boars get together to play poker in the keep”

“You're a good little scamperer.” commented Johnny, plainly in his element.

“How much further to the top?” Ashen faced Miss Scarlett heaved herself over the lip of the spur.

“It's so close that I can smell it!” Johnny grinned, sniffing the warm, sweet breeze that blew down from the pog.

“Yeah. I just put my f****n' hand on one of 'em” Miss Scarlett shrugged, displaying her punctured palm.

“This feels like the oldest part of the mountain,” whispered Miss Scarlett, dipping her voice as if we had just entered a place of worship, and, in a way, we had.

“Older than the castle?”

Secrets of the Oppidum

2010-04-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

Ab la dolchor del temps novel foillo li bosc, e li aucel chanton, chascus en lor lati, segon lo vers del novel chan...

( 'In the sweetness of the new season the woods turn green and the birds sing, each one in its own language, following the measure of the new song...' )

Guilhelm IX ( 1071 -1126 )

Spring is coming to the high pastures of the Ariege in a riotous spray of wild flowers and bit by bit the pog of Montsegur is starting to yield up its secrets. We've been spending much of our time since the thaw following up on the voluminous textural and archaeological leads amassed during the course of the long, Pyrenean winter. Some of the geographic locations mentioned in the various tomes, treatises and oral accounts that have come to our attention since setting up our base of operations in the Zone have proved to be easier to find than others. All too often dearly cherished myths and theories have faded into the ether like the vanishing snows as the facts on the ground have shown them to either be highly imaginative or simply not true.

A return visit to the Reboulet revealed that some of the ruined cottages that we had come across earlier ( * see 'The Hole of the Crows – Dec 2009 ) had been abandoned as recently as World War II, when they'd apparently served as a base for Catalan freedom fighters who used this isolated, densely wooded valley as a mustering point for raids across the border into occupied Spain. The German soldiers who had been dispatched to Montsegur during the war came to this area to clear out the partisans rather than take part in some clandestine treasure hunt as has been suggested by certain pseudo-historians. Either way no one around here likes to talk about it much. The German-Jewish folklorist and all-round pagan imperialist Otto Rahn, whose work did so much to draw the wider world's attention to the tragic history of the castle and the ongoing mystery surrounding it, didn't join the ranks of the SS until long after he had left the Languedoc and with Colonel Howard Buchner's engaging yarn about Otto Skorzeny retrieving the 'treasure of the ages' from a cave on the pog ( * see 'Emerald Cup, Ark of Gold', Thunderbird Press, 1991 ) revealed to be little more than a latter day shaggy dog story there would seem to be little or no surviving evidence to suggest that the Nazi high command were ever particularly interested in Montsegur, let alone that they deployed troops to the area as part of a bona fide attempt to retrieve some lost sacred power object, appealing as this idea may seem to our pulp sensibilities.

Montsegur - Friday April 9 2010

This isn't to say that the mountain doesn't hold it's fair share of secrets, but the nature of what may or may not be hidden here, remains open to speculation. Thus far our efforts to find the mythical entrances to the underground galleries have proven fruitless. Either they turn out to be shallow depressions or else Micheu Pierre was right in saying that as soon as you talk about them, they close up and switch their locations. ( * see 'Hunting for the Cosmic Egg – April 2010 ) We did however, come across further vestiges of 12^th century habitation during our recent excursions to the relatively inaccessible eastern flank of the pog. We're currently awaiting the arrival of two more Irregulars this week before beginning a more thorough sweep of the surrounding cliffs.

As above, so below: Signs of life on the pog's east slope
Over the last few months we have tried in vain to find the elusive 'oppidum de Mayne' in the forests of Belesta. This morning with the aid of two born and bred Montsegurian's we finally achieved our goal. The 'oppidum' isn't marked on any map. There is no path or marked trail, and the only directions to go on were that it was 'somewhere above Fontestorbes, near the bridge of the prince'.

And just what is an 'oppidum', you may ask ? Julius Caesar described the larger Celtic Iron Age settlements he encountered in Gaul as oppida, and the term is now widely used to describe the pre-Roman towns that existed all across Western and Central Europe. Many 'oppida' grew from hill forts and their main features would seem to be the architectural construction of their walls and gates and their locations on hilltops commanding a convenient view of the surrounding area.
As above, so below: Fontestorbes - March 2010

The rocky outcrop above the fountain of Fontestorbes was probably occupied by prehistoric tribes since at least the Bronze Age. The name Belesta may well derive from either the Ibero-Celtic moon goddess, Belisenna or her male counterpart, Belenos and it would seem likely that the spring's phreatic source has been linked to worship of the Great Mother since time out of mind, redolent as it is of the earth's natural reproductive cycles. The spring was certainly already known as a place of worship in Roman times. The Gauls crossed the mountains via the old road over the Pic de Soularac to meet with traders from the Mediterranean, exchanging iron for pottery and other chattels. Pliny the Elder comments on the curious phenomena of Fontestorbe's intermittent source in his 'Natural History' and Popee, the wife of Nero, halted to drink at the spring before continuing on her way to take the waters at Ax's thermal baths. According to legend faeries inhabited the cave and washed their linen in it's cold clear waters. To this day, the phreatic source remains active from July to October with it's flow varying from between 20 litres per second to 1800 litres per second.
Recently the source has been all but destroyed by attempts at commercializing the site. Huge boulders have come tumbling down the hillside, smashing into the newly widened car park, as if the mountain itself is enraged at the intrusion of concrete and steel. Mayhap it's merely echoing the history of resistance that has always been so pronounced in this neck of the woods. Prior to the onset of the Albigensian Crusade, the area was the fiefdom of the Belissen family who were closely allied to the Count's of Foix and the defenders of Montsegur, the so-called 'sons and daughters of Belisenna'. The Treaty of Paris (1229) ceded the territory to Guy de Levis after the 'fields of Belissen' were captured by Simon de Montfort and the castle of Pechafilou was in turn donated by the Barons de Levis-Leran to one Gaston de Monstron in exchange for a pair of gloves. In 1522, the Protestants of Leran, led by the country houses of Peyrat and Limbrassic, rose up against their Catholic masters, burning the church of “the valley of love”. Catholic worship was completely prohibited in the area between the years 1559 and 1599 by order of the chief of the Huguenots although it has since made a cautious resurgence.

The spur above the source was first excavated by J. Louis Hygounnet, Guy Rancoule and Jean Tricoire who published a report on the area in the 1948 dispatch of the 'Bulletin of the Prehistoric Company of the Ariege'. They apparently unearthed dozens of coins and metal objects ( above ) as well as shards of pottery dating back as far as the third century B.C although typically much of the haul seems to have fallen into private hands. The site itself was subsequently left to languish, all but vanishing from mortal ken. Until today...

Saturday April 17

We set out at an ungodly hour after yet another late night. The early morning was cold and clear with temperatures in the shade a little over one degree Celsius. Miss Scarlett and myself blanched a little when we realized we were heading up the same, seemingly dead end trail as before but our Montsegurian friend's innate sense of direction and cool demeanour gave us hope that this time our efforts might not be in vain. When we took this path before, we hewed to the left towards an outcrop known as the 'Rock of Mayne' finding only bear spoor and the severed leg of an ibex before turning back. ( * see previous 'blog entry ) The terrain had simply been too icy and inhospitable for us to have any other choice.

As above, so below: Spot the film maker
This time, however, we followed a faint trail to the right, that threaded its way through the under brush, before winding up the neighbouring hillside. To be honest it felt more like an animal trail, but as we neared the summit we discovered that the hilltop was quite flat.

As above, so below: Getting warmer...

It didn't take more than a minute to come across the first pieces of old pottery that still lay half hidden in the loamy soil as they had for the last couple of thousand years.

As above, so below: The Oppidum of Mayne
Searching around through this wild place, we found dry stone walls and further evidence of terracing. Like any 'oppidum' worth its salt the view from the overgrown summit still commanded an impressive 360 degree view of the surrounding valleys.

For a moment words failed us as we stood silently gripped by the sensation of proximity to another time and another world...

As above, so below: Raiders of the lost Oppidum

It is amazing how much prehistory is still hidden in these hills and just how many sites of ancient worship seemingly dedicated to the same undying deities, the same immortal beauty...

Above: Roman coin depicting the Goddess Minerva
Below: Early 13th century nail from the pog of Montsegur

After starting the season with a few near misses it was reassuring to finally hit a home run and that despite all the misinformation out there some of the old yarns still hold true. For the moment we are back at the foot of the great narrative tree once more from which this story can go anywhere.

The key to the treasure is the treasure after all....

To be continued.