My favourite writer, from whom I stole my Steemit name, is known as Fulcanelli. His identity is uncertain, in the conventional sense. That is to say, we are not sure if there is a historical personage on record, who paid taxes and so on, who was irrefutably the writer of the works of Fulcanelli. To say that we don't know his identity is to childishly assume that the records of the law are somehow the key factor in the establishment of identity.
His identity is clear. He is the Master.
The one thing that I defy anyone, and I'm going to defend this one forever so please have a go, I defy anyone to read Fulcanelli, and not be left with the overwhelming feeling that this guy knows so much more about so much more shit than you or I will ever know that it is just absurd. It's incomprehensible.
It's bamboozling! Utterly, utterly unbelievable.
I am repeatedly dazzled by the dizzying intellectual heights he takes us to, only to plunge us, just as we feel we are grasping some sublime truth, back down into the cold, boggy quagmire of completely stupefying incomprehension.
He is kind, he is patient. He reminds us that many an adept has been confused by this point, and he explains again, and we are with him and then just as abruptly and without warning, he suddenly disappears back into the arcane forest of symbols he has been guiding us through, and once more we are hopelessly lost and simultaneously mesmerised by the continuing march of chimera and ephemera through our sensory apparatus.
The mind boggles, and then it boggles some more.
I am moved to try and find a little choice quotation from the master that will give a taste of what I am trying to describe to you.
Hold on. Okay, how's this one:
"Seek, my brothers, without becoming discouraged, since both here and at other obscure points you must make a great effort. You must have read in various parts of your works that the Philosophers speak clearly only when they want to divert the attention of the unitiated from their Round Table. The descriptions they give of their processes and the symbolical colours they attribute to them are of perfect clarity. Therefore, you may conclude that these observations, so fully described, must be false and illusory. Your books are sealed, like the book of the Apocalypse; they are sealed with cabalistic seals. You must break them, one by one. The task is hard, I know, but to conquer without danger is to triumph without glory."
Okay so, yeah, I'm good with this. It sounds intense, but yeah, let's do this.
He goes on:
"Learn, then, not how one colour differs from another, but rather how one process is to be distinguished from the one which follows it. And, first of all, what is a process? Quite simply, it is a way of growing, tending and increasing the life which your stone has received since its birth. This is a modus operandi which cannot necessarily be translated by a succession of different colours. 'He who knows the process', writes Philalethes, 'Will be honoured by the princes and the great ones of the earth.' And the same author adds: 'We do not hide anything from you, except the process.'"
Wait, wha...? My stone? Oh, shit should I be already trying to make a Philosopher's Stone then? I suddenly feel like I'm a kid who hasn't done his homework here. I'll have to read it again I must have missed the part where he told me how to get my stone in the first place.
I'm going to skip a bit because I don't want to fall foul of usage rights... But trust me, only a few lines later it's like this:
"You will understand in what way it is fitting to carry out the coction, when you have acquired perfect knowledge of the process. In this way you will better understand Tollius' admonitiion to the puffers, those slaves to the literal meaning: 'Depart at once, you who sedulously seek your diverse colours in your glass vessels. You tire my ears with your black crow; you are as mad as that man in the old story, who used to applaud at the theatre, although he was there by himself, because he always imagined some new spectacle before his eyes. You do the same, when you shed tears of joy, when you imagine that you see in your vessels your white dove, your yellow eagle and your red pheasant. Go away, I say, and keep far from me, if you are seeking the philosophic stone in something fixed... for the latter will no more penetrate metal bodies than the body of man will go through solid walls.....'"
What the hell is this guy actually talking about? I mean, I love what he is saying. I can't get enough of it, but holy shit there lengthy sections where I just cannot make head nor tail of what he is on about.
There is pages and pages of it. In this particular book, the explications of this supposed alchemical process are all tied to the carvings and monuments on the great Medieval Cathedrals of France. That is the crazy thing about this book. He is not actually talking about something ephemeral, something you cannot touch. This shit is carved in stone. It is arguably the most ultimately tangible substance on earth - Stone! You can go and see them, and I recommend you do.
Broadly, Fulcanelli seems to be the last heir to a system of knowledge stretching back across the aeons. A system of knowledge which was apparently so important at one point to mankind that Medieval Europe just stopped doing anything for a few hundred years except make Gothic Cathedrals. And on those cathedrals, on those Houses of God they carved the secrets of The Art.
Love it. I mean, come on, this is awesome, right?
Fulcanelli's gift to the world is mystery. It comes on right after that feeling of knowing absolutely nothing, of being basically clueless, which some people work so hard to avoid - the feeling of being in the presence of a genuine mystery.
His first book is actually called The Mystery of the Cathedrals. It's a corker, you should buy it.