The so-called "Cyclical Cross" is an enigmatic monument located in the Basque town of Hendaye, in the French Pyrenees Atlantiques. Its esoteric symbolism was analyzed in the XNUMXs by Fulcanelli, the "last of the Alchemists", who saw in the Latin inscription on the arms of the cross and in the bas-reliefs on its pedestal the revelation of the Four Ages of humanity and the prophecy of the cataclysm next future that will come to put an end to the deadly Iron Age.

La "Cyclical Cross" or "Alchemical Cross" is an enigmatic monument of the Basque town of Hendaye (in Basque language «Hendaya»), today in French territory a short distance from the Spanish border and the Atlantic coast. In the 20s it was visited by Fulcanelli, a French author who - it is said - was the last of the alchemists. 

«About the identity of this character, in whose name the words are combined Feu (fire) ed Elie (Elijah, the prophet raised to heaven on a chariot of fire, according to the biblical narrative), we have only vague and uncertain conjectures " [1]. 

According to some of them, Fulcanelli would have been an anti-Nazi partisan leader of southern France, known only by the nickname of "White Knight" [2]; for still others, Fulcanelli would have been one of the Brothers of Heliopolis, a secret society "which, from link to link in a long chain, was said to have traced its foundation to the second century of our era, in Egypt, at the time of the alchemists of Alexandria" [3]. 

In fact, it is dedicated to the Brothers of Heliopolis The mystery of the cathedrals, his famous book published in 1926 in two volumes, with which he interpreted some artistic and architectural elements of the French Gothic cathedrals, and their position on the buildings, as references to the phases of the alchemical Opera. The drawings included in the original text were made by the illustrator Julien Champagne, a name that some believed concealed the true identity of Fulcanelli [4].Eugene Canseliet, a disciple of Fulcanelli who "has always refused to reveal the identity" of his teacher [5], in 1957 he wrote the preface to the second edition of Mystery of the cathedrals, adding to the book some photographs taken by Jean-Jacques Pauvert and the chapter entitled precisely The Cyclical Cross of Hendaye. This is initially described like this [6]:

Near the southern transept [of the parish of San Vincenzo, the church in the center of Hendaye] hides, under the green foliage of the churchyard, a simple stone cross, as simple as it is strange. This cross once adorned the cemetery, and only in 1842 was it placed near the church, in the place it still occupies today. At least, this is what an elderly Basque who for many years had carried out the functions of sacristan assured us. As for the origin of this cross, nothing is known about it and it was impossible for us to gather the slightest information about the time of its erection. However, based on the shape of the base and the shape of the column, we think it shouldn't be prior to the late XNUMXth or early XNUMXth century.

Fulcanelli studied the monument starting from written in Latin, sculpted in relief and on two lines, on the transverse arm of the cross - which has arms roughly equal in length - at the top of the classical column placed on the base:

OCRVXAVES
PESVNICA

translated with «O CROSS, HAVE ONE HOPE". The alleged alchemist wondered why the initial S of SPES still belonged to the previous line, generating a problem in reading the second line: PES VNICA does not mean anything. However, if you correct the second word in VNICVM you get the sentence PES VNICVM ("single foot", "With one foot"). In turn, the last word of the top line, AVES - in the scientific Latin «birds», from the classical Latin Reviews - would mean nothing in conjunction with the invocation O CRVX. Fulcanelli believed that this was by no means the "involuntary result of an absolute lack of practice with our stonemason" [7]:

The naivety of the bas-reliefs [on the base] make us think that these stone emblems are not the work of a professional chisel and burin; but, leaving aside aesthetics, we must recognize that the obscure craftsman who sculpted these images possessed a profound science and real cosmographic knowledge. […] In fact, the comparison between the motifs executed by the same hand and in the same way, demonstrates the evident concern for a normal distribution and the accuracy for their arrangement and their balance. Why on earth would the inscription have been made with less scruple? […] The characters are precise, if not elegant, [and] do not overlap. Without a doubt our craftsman wrote them first with chalk or charcoal, and this sketch must necessarily remove any idea of a possible error that occurred during the processing. But since it exists, this error must consequently be made related is, in fact, intended. The only explanation we can invoke is that of a sign put on purpose, hidden under the aspect of an inexplicable wrong execution and therefore destined to awaken the observer's curiosity. We will therefore say that, in our opinion, the author knowingly and voluntarily arranged the epigraph of this work that strikes us in that way.

The writing on Hendaye's Cross may not be the only testimony of the diffusion, at least in 700th century France, of this method of allusion to an encrypted message. A similar case of false error would be the inscription engraved on the vertical plaque from the tomb of the Marquise Marie de Negri d'Ables d'Hautpoul-Blanchefort (died January 17, 1781), located in the legendary French village of Rennes-les-Chateaux. Also in this case the writing   

it seems to have been conceived on purpose to raise the strangest doubts; in fact it contains puerile spelling errors, some of which are truly embarrassing, such as "REQUIESCAT IN PACE" written "REQUIES CATIN / PACE". Now, considering that "catin" in French means "prostitute", the error is to be considered at least suspicious,  

to the point of giving rise, together with other possible clues, to the daring hypothesis according to which the tomb of the noblewoman could actually be that of Mary of Magdala, that after the crucifixion of Jesus she would go to live in Provence or in Languedoc, "and there, as many claim, she lived to the end of her days"; the horizontal gravestone of the tomb would have been brought from Les Pontils to Rennes-les-Châteaux at a later time, but it was destroyed in 1988 and a drawing remains [8].

Fulcanelli translated the writing O CRVX AVE SPES VNICA from Latin into French and then, "using the permuting vowels of the alchemical secret language" [9], he got the phrase "Il est écrit que la vie se refugie en un seul espace","It is written that life takes refuge in a single space". According to Fulcanelli, this phrase means that [10]

There is a country in which death will not touch men when the moment of the double cataclysm comes. It is up to us to look for the geographical position of this promised land, from which the chosen ones will be able to witness the return of the golden age. 

Fulcanelli then examined the iconographic bas-reliefs of the base [11]:

On each of the four faces of the pedestal there is a different symbol. On one of them the image of the Sun, on another that of Luna, on the third there is a large one star, and on the last a geometric figure which […] is the scheme adopted by the initiates to indicate the solar cycle. It is a simple circumference divided into four sectors of two diameters which intersect at right angles. The sectors carry an A sculpted that characterizes them, as well as the four Âges [Age, in French] of the world; they then form a complete hieroglyph of the universe, formed by the conventional signs of heaven and earth, of spiritual things and earthly things, of the macrocosm and of the microcosm [respectively the circumference and the surface divided into sectors, editor's note] and in which the emblems of redemption are found together (the cross ) and the world (the circumference).

According to some interpreters of the monument, the style of the Moon and the Sun on the bas-relief is similar to that of the XVIII and XIX cards of the Tarot (the Moon and the Sun), which is why the Tarot may have been an iconographic source for the unknown artist . This may be true for the half moon from the human profile, but it is very doubtful for the Sun. This one, in the XNUMXth arcane of the Tarot, does not have distorted eyes and mouth like the one on Hendaye's base; this Sun instead remembers i Suns carved in stone by the Aztecs and Maya, for example the one in the center of the Aztec calendar on the Piedra del Sol (Stone of the Sun) made during the reign of Emperor Moctezuma II (1502-1520), a round monolith with a diameter of over 3 meters, found in Mexico City, where 'is still preserved: it depicts the solar god Tonatiuh, surrounded by four cartouches representing the four past ages, which the Aztecs called Soli. Her face, between the terrible and the grotesque, represents the Fifth Sun in need of human blood, the last age of the world: ours.READ MORE  The solar monotheism of Emperor Flavius Claudius JulianHendaye is very close to the Spanish border which conquered Central America two centuries before the Cyclical Cross was made. This may suggest that the sculptor, or his client, was a Spaniard of Basque ethnicity, or a resident of the Basque region, who visited the Mesoamerican colonies or saw some drawings of the sculptures, made in Central America and brought to Europe by the hands of others; perhaps he was a religious with vast knowledge not only of Western origin, but also from outside Europe. Among other things, some scholars have pointed out the almost total correspondence (three quadrants out of four) between the bas-reliefs of the pedestal of the Cross of Hendaye and the illustrations on a page of the Guamán Poma manuscript, a Spanish chronicler who in the sixteenth century exhibited the Inca doctrine of cyclical time or the "Five Suns" in a code that has come down to the present day. It can in fact be noted that the first three quadrants of Poma's illustration - representing the Sun, the Moon and the Star - are perfectly identical to those present on the pedestal of the Hendaye Cross, while the fourth depicts an anthropomorphic figure (perhaps the god Viracocha ) which stands on the top of a mountain, on whose slopes the three caves can be distinguished from which, according to the Andean myth, the three human races would have come to light at the beginning of Fifth Sun, or rather of the time in which we find ourselves, equivalent to the Iron Age Hesiod and the Kali Yuga of the Hindus. From the central cave, called Pacaritambo, the ancestors of the Incas, the Ayar brothers, would come out.

Hendaye's Sun is surrounded by four stars, each with six rays: this composition can remember the four Living Beings around Christ the Judge of human history (Apocalypse, 4, 6-8), which in turn has "a face like the sun when it shines in all its strength" and "flaming eyes" (Ap., 2, 18); can also remember the seraphs, each with six wings, around the Throne of God in the mystical vision of the prophet Isaiah (Isaia, Postal Code. 6); the total of the rays (twenty-four) of the four stars can recall the twenty-four Elders of theApocalypse (Ap., 4, 4; 10). The large star, on the side of the base opposite that of the Sun, has eight rays: the number 8 added to 24 gives 32, the number of rays of the angry Sun (16 short and 16 elongated) and, probably, of the years of Jesus in central period of his life as a preacher. Fulcanelli also writes [12]:

We are in the presence of two symbolic crosses [...]: above, the divine cross, an example of the way chosen to atone [the sins of humanity], below the cross of the globe, which indicates the pole of thehemisphere boreal and which identifies in time the fatal epoch of this expiation.

The intersection between the two lines that divide the circle into four quarters therefore identifies the North Pole, that is, the center of the Earth seen from above, from the astronomical north and from the Polar Star, considered by ancient cosmologies to be the fixed and immutable point of the entire universe. A view from above and immutable on the planet, can only allude to the all-seeing one of God; the circle therefore represents the space-time seen by the eye of the Eternal Judge. The upper cross alludes to the one to which Christ was crucified; that of the circle would mark the end of the time cycle: the two crosses could therefore indicate the beginning and the end of the divine judgment on humanity. At the same time, the hemisphere divided into four can symbolize the four continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, America), that is the totality of the world excluding Oceania, explored starting from the eighteenth century (and this would strengthen the hypothesis that sculpture was built within the first quarter of the eighteenth century).All this seems to "talk" about dies irae, of the end times, of universal judgment. We could ask ourselves if it was the Hendaye Cross, with the last word obtained from the first line of the writing, AVES, that suggested the idea of the end of the world implemented by the fury of the birds (birds) to the writer Daphne Du Maurier, English but of French origin, who wrote the story in 1952 Birds (birds) at the basis of the famous film by Alfred Hitchcock.The four ages of the world recognized by Fulcanelli in the four A's of the four sectors of the circle-cosmos (whose photograph, in plate XLVIII of Mystery of the cathedrals, by mistake it is overturned), are explicitly described by him as the four Yuga of the Indian tradition: the first, Satya Yuga or Krita Yuga [13], the second, Treta Yuga: the third, Dvapara Yuga; finally, Kali Yuga, literally the "dark age", "in which we ourselves find ourselves living" [14]:

In Hindu mythology, the four equal sectors of the circumference, formed by the cross, served as the basis for a very singular mystical conception. The whole cycle of human evolution is embodied under the aspect of a cow, symbolizing virtue, and her hooves each stand on one of the four sectors representing the ages of the world. In the first age, which corresponds to the golden age of the Greeks and which is called Credeayougam, or Age of Innocence [Satya Yuga], Virtue remains firmly on earth: the cow rests completely on its four feet. In the Tredayougam or second age, corresponding to the Silver Age, the cow weakens and is held only on three legs. For the duration of the Touvabarayougam or third age, corresponding to that of the bronze, it is reduced to only two feet. And finally in our Iron Age, the cyclical cow, that is the human Virtue, reaches the supreme degree of weakness and senility: it is supported with difficulty, balanced on one foot. It is the fourth and last age, the Calyougam, age of misery, misfortune and ruin. [15]

The use of Hindu symbology thus reveals that the second line of the inscription on the horizontal arm of the cross, PES VNICA, may allude to PES VNICVM (single foot) on which, in extreme danger of falling, the cow - that is human virtue - stands during the kali yuga.     Fulcanelli, studying the Hendaye Cross, identified a possible link between the end of the historical cycle and the passage from the end of one millennium to the beginning of the next: the presence of the two letters X on the cross at the top of the column, one at the end of the word CRVX and the other occupying the entire cartouche instead of the acronym INRI, which in this case is exactly above the X of CRVX. The two Xs can be read as Roman numerals, and deduce that with XX we mean 10 + 10, that is 20: twenty, according to the Christian calendar, are the centuries that have come to an end with the year 2000. But they can also indicate the number 1000 repeated twice, and then, if added together, 2000: again the final year of the twenty centuries of the Christian era. Fulcanelli was well aware of the chiliastic meaning (i.e. indicating the number one thousand) of the letter X, and linked it to Christian millenarianism and its auspices of palingenesis, or the end of the world, at the end of a millennium. [16].READ MORE  René Guénon: "To reunite what is scattered"The Swiss historian Auguste Viatte (1901-1993), ed Les sources occultes duRomanticism (The occult sources of Romanticism), a study from 1928 judged "still very useful" in the 80s, wrote that "among personalities [to esprits] more different, a wave of millennialism [vague de millenarisme] is formed, grows and waits to unleash " throughout the XNUMXth century, sometimes intertwining with Enlightenment ideas, waiting for a renewal of humanity which, later on, even some Catholic groups who hoped for a moral purification of the Church believed would manifest itself in the French Revolution [17].

The unknown author of the Hendaye Cross, who perhaps worked at the beginning of the eighteenth century, wanted to indicate the transition between two millennia (the two Xs) just because of its millennial creed? Do the two millennia expressed by the two "grafted" Xs on the cycle of the Greek and Indian Four Ages present on the Cross simply indicate two alternating epochs, or precisely the first two millennia of the Christian calendar which have come to an end?We can neither deny nor affirm with certainty that the two millennia symbolized by the two Xs of the cross indicate the first two Christian millennia ended with the year 2000. If the author of the Cross of Hendaye really knew Mesoamerican iconography and he was inspired by it to sculpt the face of the Wrathful sun, he could also know the "Long count" of the Maya, consisting of five eras, the last of which - as many now know - would have ended with the Christian year 2012. He would therefore have integrated the Hindu-Greek elements (the Four Ages) and Christian (the invocation written on the cross ) relating to the end of the time cycle, with the Mesoamerican chronological element: the year 2012, indicated by the two Xs (= two millennia ended). We could also note that, in the inscription of the cross, the only other two letters that can be read as Roman numerals and, at the same time, perfectly aligned vertically are the two U written with the Latin character V: one in CRVX (upper line) and the other in VNICA (bottom row); reading them as 5 + 5 gives 10, and 10 added to 2000 gives 2010, a date even closer to 2012. Therefore it is not entirely impossible that the author wanted to indicate the period between 2000 and 2012 as the date of the final catastrophe.But did Fulcanelli also know the Maya's "Long Count" and the final date of 2012? He believed that between the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third a world cataclysm? Concluding the chapter on Hendaye's Cross, he wrote [18]:

The only seal ofIron Age it is that of death. His hieroglyph is the skeleton provided with the attributes of Saturn: the empty hourglass, which indicates the elapsed time, and the scythe, reproduction of the number seven, which is the number of transformation, of destruction, of annihilation.

The western sign (but of Arabic origin) with which the number seven it is in fact similar to the scythe with the blade pointing upwards from the traditional figure of Death [19]. However, neither the skeleton, nor the hourglass, nor the scythe are present on the Basque monument. Furthermore - unlike what can be hypothesized for the iconographic source of the Moon on the base - in the case of the number 7, sign of death, it is not possible to resort to Tarocchi, because among the twenty-two "arcana" the Death with the sickle it is not the VII but the XIII, and not always, on this card, the sickle is held with the blade upwards. Fulcanelli then highlights the meanings of the number 7 - transformation, destruction, annihilation - although they are not those commonly known: for example, in Bible, the rainbow with its seven colors indicates the renewed covenant between God and man after the universal flood (Genesis, Postal Code. 9); seven lights symbolize "the eyes of the Lord that search all the earth" (Zacharias, Postal Code. 4), according to some "a mystical description that suggests a symbolism of astral origin: it would correspond to the seven planets and the seven heavens" [20]; in the'i ching, the Judgment of the hexagram 24, It was, The Return, reads: "On the seventh day there is the return", Commented thus by Richard Wilhelm:" Seven is the number of young light ", that is, of rebirth, of the return of light and energy that [21].Because then Fulcanelli affirmed that the "only" symbol suitable to indicate the conclusion of the Iron Age, and therefore of all four ages of the world expressed by the Hendaye Cross, is the image of Death characterized by sickle reproducing the number 7?

A possible solution could be found by resorting to a relatively well-known Hebrew numerological system, the Gematria, whose name seems to derive from the Greek geometrèia(geometry), since it implies the relationships between numbers, or grammatheia [22]. Gematria associates each letter of the Hebrew alphabet with a digit, so that the letters that make up a word can give that word a precise corresponding number. The first ten letters coincide with the digits from 1 to 10, so the number 7 corresponds to the Hebrew letter zayin, that is our sonorous Z (for example in the word "mosquito"). There zayin it is the only Hebrew letter resembling a Latin T, that is to say a small cross: a sign that can be connected to death in a Christian context, but which also resembles a hammer, a pickaxe or an ax: tools that can be used as weapons. According to Jewish esotericism, each letter has a meaning esoteric and a meaning kabbalistic [23], and the esoteric meaning of the letter zayin, which is 7, is just "weapon". The kabbalistic meaning of the same letter is instead "tendency".It is not at all impossible that Fulcanelli also knew, among the various esoteric, symbolic and alchemical languages, these too Hebrew codes. If Fulcanelli, in addition to the symbolism of the Hendaye monument, knew:

• the Hebrew alphabet and Gematria, and therefore knew the value of the Hebrew letter zayin is 7;
• the esoteric and kabbalistic meaning of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and therefore knew that this meaning, in the case of the letter zayin it is a "weapon"; 

he may have joined the esoteric (weapon) meaning of the letter zayin (which is worth 7) the similarity of the number 7 with the scythe of Death. So he would have "grafted" this combination on the meanings of the symbols already present on Hendaye's Cross:

• il Christian millennialism, who imagined a change of epoch as two millennia alternate: the two Xs on the arms of the cross; 
• il kali Yuga Hindu (the Greek Iron Age, logically linked to weapons), obtained from the circle divided into four with the four As and from the allusion to the PES VNICVM of the cow (human virtue) in the inscription PES VNICA.

In this way Fulcanelli could have integrated the symbolism of Hendaye's Cross with the number 7, a sign of total destruction, going well beyond the simple graphic resemblance to the scythe of Death. The number 7 would constitute "the only seal of the Iron Age" because the 7 is the symbol of death as it corresponds to the Hebrew letter which means "weapon".   Fulcanelli could therefore have been convinced that the'Iron Age it would end by means of weapons, that is, during a war of unprecedented extent and violence. But did he also believe that this apocalyptic war would take place at the end of the first two millennia of the Christian era indicated by the two Xs, that is, at the end of the century in which he himself lived? The writer does not know.READ MORE  A Science in Tatters: Survivals of Doctrines of Cyclic Time from the Timaeus to the Apocalypse

Neither the author of Hendaye's Cross nor Fulcanelli could foresee that, as soon as the two Christian millennia (the two X's) were over, something would really happen that put the whole of humanity in a state of instability (like the cow that in the kali yuga stands dangerously PES VNICVM, on one foot): the air attack on the Twin Towers in Manhattan on 11 September 2001 by the Al Qaeda terrorists, which could have triggered a third world war capable of eliminating a large part of the human population in a few years. In such a circumstance, every person would undoubtedly want to save himself by taking refuge in a delimited area inaccessible to the surrounding disaster.Well, returning to the meanings of the Hebrew letters it turns out that there is a precise alphabetical series that expresses a meaning very close to this situation. If through Gematria we convert the series of letters into numbers (to be read from right to left) bet-zayin-zain-he (corresponding to our BZZH) we obtain the series of figures: 2-7-7-5. The series 5772 interpreted according to the esoteric meaning of his letters results:

bet - zayin - zayin - he
2 - 7 - 7 - 5
House (or Tent) - Weapon - Weapon - Existence

According to the kabbalistic meaning, however, the same sequence means: 

Fence (or Dwelling) - Tendency - Tendency - Breath of life

The esoteric and kabbalistic meanings of the sequence of letters he-zain-zain-bet, in figures 5772, could therefore express, in a complementary way, a world catastrophe situation: I'existence of humanity involved in a war (weapon + weapon) with a triggering cause, or as a goal, the dwelling (property o tent) [24] (esoteric interpretation); therefore living beings (vital breath) will have strengthened tendency (trend + trend) to gather in a delimited place (enclosure) (kabbalistic interpretation).

This last sentence has a meaning very similar to the meaning of the writing on the Hendaye Cross deciphered by Fulcanelli by means of the "permuting vowels" he presumably knew: "Is written: life takes refuge in a single space". Imagining that Fulcanelli really knew these numerological and symbolic interpretations of the Hebrew letters, he might have noticed a surprising combination of coincidences:

• the sentence of Hendaye's Cross which he deciphered - "It is written: life takes refuge in a single space"- is almost identical to the kabbalistic interpretation of the number series 5772: living beings (vital breath) will have strengthened tendency (trend + trend) to gather in a delimited place (enclosure);
• the 5772 series applied to the Hebrew calendar - which tradition has started with the year 3761 BC. C. - indicates the year 5772, which corresponds to the final year of the fifth epoch of the Maya "Long Count": 2012 d. C.: a year chronologically not far from the end of the two millennia or from the year 2010, possibly indicated by the two Xs and the two Vs on the cross. 

As a consequence of both these concordances, Fulcanelli may have interpreted the possible relationship between the symbols on the Hendaye Cross on the one hand, and that of the Hebrew letters with their gemstone values and their secret meanings on the other, as a sort of double indication of the fact that humanity's last armed war would undoubtedly take place between the year 2000 and the year 2012 of the Christian era. But we cannot be sure that he was really convinced of it. The conclusive hypothesis, therefore, is that the unknown author of the Hendaye Cross:

• he knew the concordance between the Christian year 2012 and the final year of the "Long count" of the Maya and - knowing the traditional Hebrew chronology - he "translated" it in the year 5772;
• was able to convert the series of numbers 5772 into the corresponding series of Hebrew letters (he-zain-zain-bet) and was able to "translate" it into the Kabbalistic language (which he therefore knew), obtaining the series of meanings "vital breath, doubled tendency, fence";
• finally he codified this sequence in the writing O CRVX AVES PES VNICA, trusting that a future reader, in possession of his own kabbalistic and cryptographic knowledge, would have grasped the analogy between the writing deciphered through the alchemical language (it is written: life takes refuge in a single space) and the Kabbalistic meaning of the Hebrew year 5772 (the living will have a strengthened tendency to enclose themselves in a delimited place), and he would have been able to chronologically place the situation of humanity indicated by both texts. 

Was the desired future reader the mysterious Fulcanelli? He only alluded to a final catastrophe characterized by a "double cataclysmWithout clarifying what the two aspects of the cataclysm would be and without making explicit any dates. In conclusion, therefore, we do not know if Fulcanelli did not believe that the catastrophe would have occurred in the years 2000-2012, or if he too full avoid indicating the year 2012 openly, limiting yourself to making known the deciphered writing «It is written: life takes refuge in a single spaceAnd trusting in turn that, in the future, someone would be able to recognize the time to which it refers.

Note: 

1 - Serge Hutin, The daily life of alchemists in the Middle Ages, Milan, RCS-Fabbri Editori, 1997 [ed. or. Paris, Hachette, 1977], p. 38 note 11.

2 - Ibidem, P. 210. 

3 - Ibidem, P. 206

4 - Ibidem, P. 210.

5 - Ibidem, pp. 209-210.

6 - Fulcanelli, The mystery of the cathedrals, Rome, Mediterranean Editions, 1972, p. 170.

7 - Ibidem, pp. 170-171. 

8 - Arianna Kellermann et alii, Journey to Arcadia, http://arjelle.altervista.org/Arcadia/indice.htm. I owe the knowledge of this highly articulated research to Dr. Marco Caccin of Chivasso (TO).

9 - Roberto Giacobbo, 2012. The end of the world?, Rome – Milan, RAI-ERI - Mondadori, 2009, p. 95. What this secret alchemical language is is not specified even by Fulcanelli himself, who limits himself to speaking of "permuting vowels" (The mystery of the cathedrals cit., p. 172).

10 - Fulcanelli, on. cit., p. 172; Jacob, on. cit., P. 95.

11 - Fulcanelli, op. cit., P. 173.

12 - Ibidem, P. 172.

13 - Jacob, op. cit., p. 96; Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, John Grigsby, The enigma of Mars. Warning signs from the red planet, Milan, Corbaccio, 1999, p. 200.

14 - Hancock, The enigma of Mars cit., p. 200.

15 - Fulcanelli, op. cit., P. 174.

16 -  Ibidem, P. 172.

17 - See Joyce O. Lowrie, The violent mistique: thematics of retribution and expiation in Balzac, Barbey d'Aureville, Bloy and Huysmans, Genève, Librairie Droz, 1974, p. 11 (available on Google Books); Marina Caffiero, Revolution and millennium. The millennial currents in Italy in the revolutionary period, in Bernard Plongeron (sous la direction de), Pratiques religieuses, mentalités et spiritualités dans l'Europe revolutionnaire (1770-1820), Actes du colloque, Chantilly, 27-29 November 1986, ed. Paris, BREPOLS, 1988, p. 95. 

18 - Fulcanelli, op. cit., p. 174; Jacob, on. cit., P. 96.

19 - This famous iconography has been crossing Western art for two millennia, fromApocalypse biblica (ca. 90 AD) to the frescoes of the late Middle Ages on the Triumph of Death,  Metropolis by Thea von Harbou (1912), a The seventh seal by Ingmar Bergman (1957), a What do we have to do with the revolution? (Sergio Corbucci, 1972), where Vittorio Gassman and Paolo Villaggio believe they see the "Great Mower" in a miserable Mexican dressed in black rags who, riding a donkey, advances towards them with a scythe pointing upwards.

20 - Jean Chevalier, Alain Gheerbrant (editor), Dictionary of symbols, Milan, BUR Rizzoli, 1986-87 (or. Ed. Paris 1969), vol. I, pp. 183-185.

21 - I Ching. The Book of Changes, edited by Richard Wilhelm, Milan, Adelphi, 1991, pp. 140-141. 

22 - See René Guénon, Symbols of sacred science, Milan, Adelphi, 1990, p. 54 note 7. 

23 - Which we get from Occultism, mystery and magic, Great themes series, Novara, De Agostini, 1976, p. 55.

24 - The term "dwelling" can combine both esoteric meanings in question: the house - that is, a fixed residence - and the tent - that is, a temporary, nomadic residence. In the Jewish tradition this immediately makes us think of the Abode of God: tent during the pilgrimage in the desert towards the promised land (the so-called Tabernacle), home when the Temple of Jerusalem wanted by King Solomon was erected (XNUMXth century BC). Consequently, the abode par excellence of the Jewish tradition is Jerusalem, a city violently disputed by Muslims, who believe it was the only place from which Muhammad (Mohammed) was able to see Paradise in life.