Fulcanelli: The Vanished Alchemist and the Secrets Carved into Notre-Dame
Who was Fulcanelli? In 1926 a slim book called Le Mystère des Cathédrales (The Mystery of the Cathedrals) appeared quietly in a few Paris bookshops. Its author, Fulcanelli, claimed that France's great Gothic cathedrals were alchemical textbooks carved in stone. Nobody has ever proved who wrote it, and by the time readers opened the book, its author had vanished.
In this episode of the Adventure Story Podcast, I dig into one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the 20th century. It's also the mystery at the heart of The Alchemist's Codex, the eighth book in my Eden Black archaeological thriller series. We follow Fulcanelli's trail from Notre-Dame to the streets where Nicolas Flamel, Paris's most legendary alchemist, lived and worked 500 years earlier.
In this episode:
- A book written in stone: How Fulcanelli, his student Eugène Canseliet and the painter Julien Champagne turned Notre-Dame de Paris into a "laboratory manual". We also look at the medallion of Alchemy on the central portal of the Last Judgment.
- The man who came before: Nicolas Flamel, the 14th-century scribe whose mysterious wealth, legendary transmutation of 1382 and reportedly empty tomb made him alchemy's most famous name.
- Gold, warnings and a vanishing act: Canseliet's account of a transmutation in 1922, Jacques Bergier's 1937 meeting with a stranger who warned of atomic weapons, and the last reported sighting of Fulcanelli in Seville in 1953.
- So who was he? The meaning of the name, plus the leading theories: Julien Champagne, Canseliet himself, the physicist Jules Violle, or a group of people writing together.
- The third book: Finis Gloriae Mundi (The End of the World's Glory), the manuscript Fulcanelli reportedly took back before it could be printed. It has never been found.
Key takeaways:
- The Mystery of the Cathedrals (1926) argues that medieval craftsmen encoded the stages of alchemy in the sculpture of Gothic cathedrals.
- Fulcanelli asked readers to look down, not up. He pointed them to small carvings most visitors walk straight past, such as the figure of Alchemy at the base of Notre-Dame's central portal.
- A second book, Les Demeures Philosophales (The Dwellings of the Philosophers), applied the same method to mansions and chapels across France. After that, Fulcanelli fell silent.
- You can still visit Nicolas Flamel's Paris today: his house on Rue de Montmorency (built in 1407 and often called the oldest stone house in the city), his tombstone in the Musée de Cluny, and the Tour Saint-Jacques.
- Fulcanelli's true identity has never been proven, a century after the book first appeared.
Frequently asked questions:
Who was Fulcanelli?
Fulcanelli was the pseudonym of a French alchemist who wrote The Mystery of the Cathedrals (1926) and The Dwellings of the Philosophers (1930). His real identity remains unknown.
What is the alchemy medallion on Notre-Dame?
It's a carving on the central pillar of the Last Judgment portal. It shows a seated woman holding a sceptre, with an open book, a closed book and a ladder. Fulcanelli read it as the figure of Alchemy herself.
Did Nicolas Flamel really make gold?
Flamel was a real Paris scribe who became very wealthy. Historians believe the account of his transmutation was written about two centuries after his death by someone borrowing his reputation.
What is Finis Gloriae Mundi?
It's Fulcanelli's reported third book, which he withdrew before publication. A book with that title appeared in 1999, but most experts dismiss it as a fake.
About the book:
In The Alchemist's Codex, Eden Black is drawn into the shadowy world of Parisian alchemy, where Fulcanelli's secret is far more than a historical curiosity. Search The Alchemist's Codex wherever you get your books.
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Transcript
In a handful of bookshops across the city, a slim volume appears without fanfare.
Speaker A:The title is the Mystery of the Cathedrals, and its author calls himself Falconelli.
Speaker A:Those who open it find something astonishing.
Speaker A:The great Gothic cathedrals of France, the book claims, were never just places of worship.
Speaker A:They are books carved in stone, hiding a secret that kings and popes and scholars have hunted for centuries.
Speaker A:That secret is alchemy.
Speaker A:The power to turn base metals into gold, and perhaps, just maybe, the power to cheat death itself.
Speaker A:But the name on the COVID is a mask, and no one has ever proved the identity of the man behind it.
Speaker A:And by the time the first readers turned the pages, he had disappeared completely.
Speaker A:Hey, I'm Luke.
Speaker A:I'm an author of archaeological adventure novels.
Speaker A:I travel the world looking for stories to put into my books and to share with you right here on the Adventure Story podcast.
Speaker A:I welcome.
Speaker A:Thank you for joining me.
Speaker A:Just quickly, before we get into today's topic, most podcasts grow through recommendations, so if you've got an adventure lover in your life you think would like this deep dive, let them know.
Speaker A:Share it.
Speaker A:Thanks very much in advance.
Speaker A:In today's episode, we're lifting the lid on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the 20th century.
Speaker A:And it's a mystery I've been living with for the past year, because it sits at the heart of my new book, the eighth book in the Eden Black archaeological thriller series, the Alchemist's Codex.
Speaker A:This, though, is the story of Fulcanelli.
Speaker A:And because no story about Parisian alchemy is complete without him, it's also the story of a man who walked the same streets 500 years earlier, a man called Nicolas Flamel.
Speaker A:Part one, a book written in stone.
Speaker A:So let's start with the book itself, because the story of how this book reached the world is almost as strange as what you might find inside it.
Speaker A:The Mystery of the Cathedrals was published by a young man called Eugene Cancilliet, who said he'd been Falconelli's student.
Speaker A:And in his preface to the book, he made a claim that that must have raised a few eyebrows at the time.
Speaker A:His master, he said, had completed the great work.
Speaker A:In other words, he'd achieved the transmutation that alchemists had been chasing for thousands of years.
Speaker A:But then, rather than enjoying or sharing his success, he'd simply vanished.
Speaker A:The illustrations in the book are interesting, too.
Speaker A:They come from a painter called Julian Champagne, who was another member of Fulcanelli's small and rather secretive circle.
Speaker A:And between Them, they put together this guided tour of Gothic architecture, which is unlike anything anyone has ever published before.
Speaker A:And at the heart of it, right there in the centre, is Notre Dame de Paris.
Speaker A:Now, I don't know about you, but when you stand in front of Notre Dame de Paris, you can't but look up at the thing, your eyes drawn to those towers and that rose window and the spire looming behind them all.
Speaker A:But Falconelli says something different.
Speaker A:He encourages readers to look down.
Speaker A:Specifically, he wants you to look at the stone pillar that divides the central doorway, the portal of the Last Judgment.
Speaker A:And near its base, you'll find, he says, a small carved figure that most visitors walk straight past without even noticing.
Speaker A:But that is what he's looking for, because one of those medallions shows a woman seated on a throne with her head reaching up into the clouds.
Speaker A:She holds a scepter in one hand and there are two books in front of her, one open and one closed.
Speaker A:And a ladder rests against her body.
Speaker A:Now, Falconelli was convinced that this was the figure of alchemy herself.
Speaker A:The open book, he explained, stood for the knowledge that anyone could see, while the closed one held the secret kept for those who knew how to read it.
Speaker A:And the ladder, of course, represented the patience that this work demanded as you climb towards the truce one rung at a time.
Speaker A:Now, that's just one tiny part of that massive building.
Speaker A:But if you work your way right across that facade, reading the ravens and the lions and the dragons and the kings and the salamanders and whatever else you see, all of the different stages of that alchemical process.
Speaker A:By the time Falconelli had finished, the cathedral really had become something else entirely.
Speaker A:It's a laboratory manual, hidden right there in plain sight, carved by medieval craftsmen who, if Fulcanelli was right, knew exactly what they were doing.
Speaker A:Four years later, a second book followed, this one called the Dwellings of the Philosophers, which applied the same kind of reading to mansions and chapels and other buildings all over France.
Speaker A:But after that, Falconelli fell silent.
Speaker A:Part 2 the man who Came before now, to understand why Falconelli caused such a stir, we need to look back and we need to think about a legendary alchemist that had always already walked the streets of Paris.
Speaker A:But unlike Falconelli, there's no doubt that this man really existed.
Speaker A:His name was Nicolas Flamel.
Speaker A:Flamel was a scribe and a bookseller in 14th century Paris.
Speaker A:Working in the streets around the church, St Jacques de la Boucherie.
Speaker A:He married a woman named Pernell.
Speaker A:And if you look at the records of the time, you'll find that the couple became surprisingly wealthy.
Speaker A:So wealthy, in fact, that they funded churches and hospitals right across the city.
Speaker A:Which, of course, raises the obvious question of where all that money came from.
Speaker A:Around two centuries after his death, a book appeared that claimed to answer that question in Flamel's own words.
Speaker A:And it's quite a story.
Speaker A:According to this account, Flamel bought a strange and ancient book for just a couple of florins, written on bark and filled with figures and words he couldn't make head nor tail of.
Speaker A:He spent years trying to decode it, until eventually he set off on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
Speaker A:And on the way home, he met a scholar who helped him unlock the secrets of the book.
Speaker A: Then, in: Speaker A:Historians are fairly confident that the account was written long after Flamel died, by someone borrowing his reputation.
Speaker A:But by then, the legend takes on a life of its own.
Speaker A:It was even said that Flamel's tomb was opened and found to be empty.
Speaker A:And over the centuries that followed, travellers claimed to have met him and his wife alive and well in distant corners of the world.
Speaker A:The wonderful thing is that, unlike Falconelli, you can still find traces of Flamel in Paris today.
Speaker A: Rue de Montmorency, built in: Speaker A:And if you look closely, you'll still see the carved inscriptions on its front.
Speaker A:His tombstone has survived too, and it's now in the Musee de Cluny.
Speaker A:And while the Tower of St. Jacques, which is all the remains of his parish church at the time, still stands just a short walk away.
Speaker A:So you can imagine how it felt when Fulcanelli came along, writing about the same city and the same stories and the same great work.
Speaker A:People couldn't help but seeing a pattern.
Speaker A:Here was another man with fortune in secret knowledge, and another figure who seemed to slip quietly out of his time.
Speaker A:Some even suggested, only half joking, that maybe Falconelli and Flamel might have been the same man.
Speaker A:Part 3 Gold warnings and a vanishing act if the books were where the Falconelli legend began, it was Canciolet's stories that turned it into something much bigger.
Speaker A:And some of them are, frankly, hard to believe.
Speaker A: ccording to Canciele, back in: Speaker A:He said that around 100 grams of this powder turned lead into gold right in front of him, and that Julien Champagne was among the people watching.
Speaker A:Then things take an even stranger turn.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:Scientists, the stranger told him, were getting dangerously close to releasing the forces locked inside the atom.
Speaker A:And the stranger said the they needed to be very careful indeed.
Speaker A:He warned that weapons could be made from just a few grains of metal, powerful enough to wipe out entire cities.
Speaker A:And he went even further, suggesting that humanity had done this once before and paid a terrible price for it.
Speaker A:Bergia believed for the rest of his life that this stranger had been Falconelli.
Speaker A:And eight years later, after the atomic bombs had fallen on Japan, he said that American intelligence officers had visited him, coming to ask if he knew where Falconelli could be found, which was a question he simply couldn't answer.
Speaker A:Then there was one final sighting.
Speaker A: Canciolet said that in: Speaker A:By then, Falconelli should have been a very old man.
Speaker A:Yet Canciolet described him as looking younger than he had.
Speaker A:The love last time they'd met.
Speaker A:And after that, the trail goes completely cold.
Speaker A:Part 4 so who was he?
Speaker A:Well, the name itself might be our first clue.
Speaker A:Many readers see it in Vulcan, the Roman God of fire in the forge.
Speaker A:Join that with El, an ancient word for God, and you get something like the sacred fire or the divine fire.
Speaker A:And for a man who spent his life working at the furnace, that feels rather fitting.
Speaker A:As for the person behind the name, there's no shortage of candidates.
Speaker A:Some people point to Julien Champagne, the painter, who certainly had both the skill and the access to pull something like this off.
Speaker A:Others believe it was Cancillet himself, inventing a mysterious master to give his own work some kind of authority.
Speaker A:One of Canciolet's students made the case for Jules Viola, a highly respected physicist of the day.
Speaker A:And then there are the researchers who think Falconelli was never one person at all, but a collaboration between several people.
Speaker A:Of course, each of these theories has its supporters, but none of them has ever been proven.
Speaker A:So 100 years on, Falconelli has done exactly what he set out to do into the Codex.
Speaker A:And it's that mystery, more than anything, that sparked my book, the Alchemist's Codex.
Speaker A:Earlier this year, Mrs. R and I set off in our camper van on a long research trip around France.
Speaker A:We stood in front of those medallions at Notre Dame.
Speaker A:We wandered the old streets where Flamel once lived and worked, and we followed the trail of carvings that Falconelli wrote about all those years ago.
Speaker A:And somewhere along the way, a corner question took hold of me and wouldn't let go.
Speaker A:What if Falconelli really did know something?
Speaker A:And what if someone out there today was willing to do anything at all to find it?
Speaker A:Of course, that's where Eden Black comes in.
Speaker A:In the Alchemist's Codex, Eden finds herself drawn into the shadowy world of Parisian alchemy, where Falconelli's secret turns out to be far more than a historical curiosity.
Speaker A:The clues are hidden in the stone.
Speaker A:As you know, the stakes couldn't be higher, and the people chasing them will stop at nothing to get what they want.
Speaker A:That's the eighth book in my Eden Black archaeological thriller series, and unlike Falconelli, it's super easy to find.
Speaker A:Just search the Alchemist's Codex wherever you get your books.
Speaker A:Part 6 the third book there's one more detail that I haven't told you yet.
Speaker A:Canciolet claimed that Falconelli wrote a third book called the End of the World's Glory.
Speaker A:He said it was handed to him for publication, and then just before it could be printed, Falconelli took it back.
Speaker A:He changed his mind.
Speaker A:No one knows what was in it or why Falconelli decided the world wasn't ready to read this book yet.
Speaker A:And as far as anyone knows, the manuscript has never been found.
Speaker A: Now, in: Speaker A:But most experts dismiss that as fake.
Speaker A:Which leaves me with one question and one question I can't answer.
Speaker A:What was so dangerous that even Fulcanelli wouldn't share it?
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