St. Remy and Les Baux – Nostradamus, Da Vinci and the Secret
Think of a triangle, with a town and its castle
at each of the points (Avignon, Salon and Arles). There’s a river on two of the three
sides, but the third side drifts so openly toward the marshes of
the south and the sea that the delta might as well be an island.
Across the center of the triangle, almost due east to west, runs
a jagged chain of sharp cliffs and steep valleys known as the Chaine
des Alpilles, the Little Alps. In actuality, they look more like
an Impressionist version of the mountainsides of ancient Greece,
shrunken to a more human scale, and placed like a stage set in the
middle of a rocky plain.
A few million years ago, the pressure from the growing Alps and the
Pyrenees buckled a portion of the ancient seabed and thrust it straight
up into the air. As the sea retreated, the bed on either side of the
buckled rock silted up and became a stony and desert-like plain, the
little Crau to the north, and the Crau to the south. The chain of limestone
peaks that separates them runs roughly 20 miles, from Eyguieres, the
eastern edge and the highest peak at just under 1,500 feet, to St.
Gabriel in the west. At the widest point, the Alpilles are barely three
miles across. Small in scale, but rich, as Frederick Mistral put it,
in “legends and glory.”
The legends began six thousand years ago when the Neolithic hunters
formed small communities in the safety of the mountain-top caves and
springs at Les Baux and Eygaliere. Around three thousand years ago,
a proto-Celtic civilization developed, one that welcomed the Greek
traders who arrived half a millennium later in the 6th century BCE.
Three hundred or so years after that, when Rome arrived in the first
flush of its empire building, the Ligurians were cultured philosophers
who had dwelt in peace so long they had virtually forgotten the art
of war. Rome saved them from the more nomadic Celts sweeping down from
the north, but at the price of their independence. The Salian confederation
of Ligurian tribes was defeated by the Romans and within a generation
the entire region was annexed as Rome's first province, the Provincia
Narbonenis. A century later, Augustus and Julius Ceasar made the roads
back to Rome, and in doing so made Celtic Gaul Roman. The first province,
Provence, quickly became the center piece of the transalpine empire.
Nestled in a narrow valley to the north of the
Ligurians' sacred mountain stood the ancient capital of Liguria, the Celto-Greek city of Glanon,
Romanized as Glanum Livii. Founded half a millennium before the turn
of the Common Era, Glanum's authority depended on its close relationship
with the Druidic priesthood at Les Baux and in the Valley of the Ancients
at Cordes. In the Roman era, it was eclipsed by Arelate (Arles), which
had wisely backed Julius Caesar in his dispute with Pompey in 49 BCE.
Even as Arelate grew, Glanum adhered to its old ways, absorbing first
the Romans, and then in the middle of the first century CE, an influx
of Jews from Palestine and other parts of the new Roman Empire. Some
of these Jews were followers of a rabble-rousing magician, Jesus the
Nazorean, who had just claimed the ancient throne of David in Jerusalem,
and been executed for treason by the Romans for the attempted restoration
of the ancient lineage. The fleeing followers included, perhaps, members
of Jesus' immediate family. As they spread throughout the region preaching
their Gospel, the cultured and thoroughly Helenized Druid philosophers
were also converted to the new faith. From this unique blend of spiritual
influences would grow an alternative version of what, a century or
two later, would be called Christianity.
The blend contained some surprising spiritual
influences. More than
a millennium before Glanum was founded at the foot of its holy Mountain,
the Egyptian traders of the 18th and 19th Dynasties arrived. The Egyptians
built trading forts off what was then mouth of the Rhone, near the
present day Ste. Maries-de-le-Mer, and travelled up the Rhone as far
as Lyons. In the Greek era, trade flowed freely from Alexandria by
way of Massilia (Marseilles). With the trade came an influx of ideas
and philosophies from the east. In the late third century BCE, Buddhist
missionaries arrived, dispatched by King Asoka in India to preach the
Eight-fold path to all the ends of the earth. For the next three centuries,
small enclaves of Buddhist hermits could be found living in the ancient
grottoes and caves of the region. Helenized statues of the Buddha have
been unearthed in the caves near Lamanon, and in at least one grotto
reportedly used by St. Marie Magdalene, north of Nimes. This unique
overlapping of influences created the very cosmopolitan and syncretic
context from which the new faith emerged, appearing suddenly and full
blown with the fervor of a Jewish messianic cult, the compassionate
techniques of the early Buddhists, and an emphasis on the Goddess-mother
and child, that is pure paganism, recognizable all the way back to
the first Neolithic hunters.
St. Remy-de-Provence, where statues of the Virgin
and Child still bless every important street corner, grew from the
ruins of Glanum's destruction. Depopulated first by Diocletian's persecution at the end
of the third century CE, there was little left to sack by the time
the Visigoths arrived in the early fifth century. At the turn of the
sixth century, the area was revitalized and given a new name by one
of those odd quirks of fate that seem to drive the history of the Dark
Ages. The Visigoths made Arelate their new capital and Alaric II proclaimed
himself king of the new empire of the Goths. They were opposed only
by the newly Christianized Merovingian Franks under Clovis. Declaring
that it was against God's will that the fairest portion of Gaul should
be ruled by heretics and heathens, Clovis invaded the south and defeated
Alaric II at the battle of Vouille. In the bargain, he became the master
of southern France all the way to the Pyrenees.
During the campaign, Clovis travelled the ancient
Roman road from Arelate to Avenio (Avignon) and camped with his army in the fields
north of the ruins of Glanum, around what would come to be called Les
Antiques. While camped at Glanum, Clovis experienced a miraculous visitation
from his mentor, St. Remy, who prophesied for Clovis the future of
his dynasty -"The Kingdom of France is predestined by God for
the defense of the... only true Church of Christ. This kingdom shall
one day be great among the kingdoms of the earth..." - as well
as his personal future - "At the end of his most glorious reign,
he shall go to Jerusalem, and shall lay down his Crown and Scepter
on the Mount of Olives..." Clovis was so impressed by this experience
that he gave the entire area to the church of Rheims, and so the new
hamlet that grew on the site was called St. Remy's town. Clovis went
on to become the greatest of the Merovingian Kings, and St. Remy-de-Provence
remained, however obscurely, woven into the sacred tradition of French
kingship.
The fortified hilltop villages, such as Eygaliere,
fared better in the next few centuries than did the new towns such
as St. Remy. Hit
hard by the plagues of the sixth century and the Arab invasion of the
eighth, a small measure of stability returned to the region with the
rise of the Carolingians. The area around St. Remy became virtually
independent as a kind of Dark Age city state, and survived in this
form until the rise of the Lords of les Baux in the middle of the tenth
century CE.
Around 950, a local nobleman named Hughes claimed
by right of descent - the ancient lineage once again - the old Roman watchtower and Druidic
observatory at the entrance to the Valley of the Ancients at Cordes,
directly in the center of the Alpilles. Perched like a vast boat -
hence the name les Baux, the beam or keel of a ship that would in local
usage come to mean any sharp uprising of rock - floating to the south
of the sacred mountains, the terrace has an unobstructed view of the
entire southern horizon, making it possibly the most significant Neolithic
and megalithic astronomical location in all of Europe. Militarily,
the site commanded both the Roman road to the north, through the passes
it looms above, and the east/west road across the Crau, which ran directly
below the rocky fortress. Possession of this site made Hughes and his
descendants the masters of the medieval empire of the sun.
The Lords of les Baux adopted the idea of a semi-divine
lineage, proclaimed
by Clovis after his vision at St. Remy, and combined it with the ancient
local traditions of Druidic astronomers to produce what to their contemporaries
was the odd idea that they were descended from the third wise man,
Balthazar. But from within the local mythic context, this was the only
description possible for a tradition that clearly preceded Christianity,
even as it recognized and embraced it. Of course the Druids of the
Valley of the Ancients had foreseen the new age in the sky, so why
shouldn't they have sent a wise man, a magi, in search of the meaning
of the Star? The Lords of Les Baux took the mythic Star, shown with
16 rays, as their family crest.
At the height of their power and influence, the Lords of Les Baux
ruled roughly one hundred villages and hilltop keeps on both sides
of the Alpilles and by the late twelfth century had taken on a role
in international power politics. Their support encouraged Frederick
I Barbarossa in his end-run around the Roman church, resulting in his
1179 coronation as King of Arles. The facade of St. Trophime in Arles,
designed and sculpted for the occasion, has a frieze depicting the
entire story of the Magi as a direct nod to the influence of the Lords
of les Baux. It was also the time of the Troubadours, who sang at the
courts of love held in Les Baux, Romanin and Roquemartine, and the
Cathar heresy, which the Lords of les Baux embraced, as well as the
first appearance in written form of the Kabbalah, the transcendent
light mysticism of the Jews, whom the Lords of les Baux held as being
under their direct protection. The troubadour cited as the source by
Chretein de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach for the original Grail
legend, one Guyot de Provence, was a vassal of the Lords of les Baux,
and it is therefore not unusual to find images and motifs from the
Grail Romances springing to mind as one contemplates the fortress of
Les Baux.
This small area, from St. Remy and Glanum up
into the sacred mountains to les Baux, seems to be the origin point for what could be called
the western mystery tradition. From the Grail legends to the ancient
neolithic sages, from the founder of the Merovingian dynasty to the
third wise man, the Lords of les Baux and the intersection between
troubadour poetry and the Cathar heresy, from goddess worship, and
Mary Magdalene, to the Kabbalah and Buddhist hermits, this spot describes
and defines the essence of the mystery of Provence. From this central
location at the antiques of Glanum, we can draw a fifty kilometre circle
that encloses the sites sacred to this mystery, including Arles, Tarascon,
Nimes, Salon-de-Provence, and Ste. Marie-de-le-Mer. Within this circle,
we can trace the development of an alternative form of Christianity,
the true history of the Grail in fact, and how this esoteric history
impacted and influenced the course of mainstream events.
Within a generation, a mere thirty years after
Frederick I’s
coronation in Arles, all would be on the verge of ruin, as first the
Pope and then the French King launched crusades against the heretics
of the south. After invasion and inquisition came the first waves of
the Black Death, and the Lordship of les Baux passed to the Counts
of Provence. In the fifteenth century, this was Good King Rene D'Anjou,
who gave Les Baux to his second wife, the beloved Queen Jeanne. It
is fitting that in its final days of independence, Les Baux was ruled
by a Queen. After her death, King Louis XI of France destroyed the
fortifications, but Les Baux continued to be an important fiefdom.
In the sixteenth century, it passed to the Marechal of France, Anne
de Montmorency. With the good Marechal, we arrive in the time of the
region's most famous historical figure, Michel de nostra domina, or
Nostradamus, who was introduced at the court of Catherine Di Medici
by Montmorency. The sixteenth century was a crucial point in the history
of France and Europe, and Nostradamus was part of all the diverse intellectual
currents of the era. Within his lifetime, his influence would begin
to shape the events of European power politics, and after his death
his shadow would continue to haunt the future, touching even our more
rational age.
Michel, eldest son of Jaume de nostra domina,
a local grain merchant and notary, was born in mid December 1503 in his grandmother house
on the Rue Hoche, the main street of the ancient Jewish section of
St. Remy-de-Provence. He spent his first fifteen years in St. Remy,
playing in the shadow of Les Antiques and absorbing the region's legends
and history from his two grandfathers. At that period, Glanum was a
legendary memory, but one that was accessible to the adventurous. The
crypt of the small chapel of St. Jean, a few hundred yards from Les
Antiques, opened on to the ancient buried temple of the Goddess of
the spring, the nympheum, of Glanum. And from there, miles of underground
water chambers and sewers were available, running from Glanum and the
monastery of St. Paul de Mausole out to the ancient quarries and beyond.
His youth in St. Remy, with its mixture of myths and ancient history,
had a profound effect on the future Seer of Provence. In six quatrains
of his famous Prophecies, he returned to the scenes of his youth, implying
that a great secret, the local myth of the "Silver Goat," would
be discovered there one day.
At fifteen, young Michel departed for the university
school at Avignon,
the scene of the French Captivity of the Church in the fourteenth century
and still the center of the region's intellectual life in the sixteenth
century. In September 1521, his studies interrupted by an outbreak
of the plague, Michel left Avignon and began his first period of wandering.
By 1529, he was in Montpelier where he applied for admission to the
medical school. One of his fellow students, the already famous humanist
Francois Rabelais, Latinized Michel's surname as Nostradamus. Nostradamus
never received his doctorate, and by the early 1530s he had settled
in Agen, in southwestern France, in order to study with the Italian
humanist Julius Ceasar Scaliger. Nostradamus married a local girl,
and quickly had two children. But disaster struck, and both his new
wife and their two children died of the plague. By 1534, Nostradamus
was on the move again.
For a decade, Nostradamus wandered the south
of France, from Provence
to the Basque coast and Bordeaux and back again. By 1544, we find a
contemporary mention of him studying the plague and its treatment with
Louis Serres in Marseilles, and then, a year or so later, he was summoned
to Aix and Salon to organize the fight against the plague. He was so
successful that the next year he was called to Lyon for the same reason.
These exploits made him well-known, and along with the division of
father's estate, he found himself wealthy enough to marry the most
eligible young widow in Salon-de-Provence, Anne Ponsard. But before
he could settle down to wedded bliss, Nostradamus found it necessary
to make a trip to Italy.
Of all of Nostradamus' mysterious periods of
wanderlust, these last journeys to Italy are perhaps the most odd. He married Anne, bought
and began to refurbish a house in Salon, and then left for a two-year
excursion. It is hard not to consider that he was in some way summoned
to Italy, or at least compelled by reasons more powerful than just
gathering recipes for his book on cosmetics. His old friend Rabelais
was in Italy, and may have been the source of the invitation. Nostradamus
alludes in his later works to collecting a number of volumes on occult
philosophy, during this trip and his later visit in 1555 - 56, that
would later serve as the source of his magickal practices. Soon after
the election of Pope Julius III in 1550, Nostradamus returned to Salon-de-Provence
and began the work that would make him famous for the next half a millennium.
Nostradamus’ rise to fame began within a few years of
his return, becoming a sixteenth century superstar within the decade when his prediction
of Henri II's death came true. Before his death in 1566, he was the
confident of the Queen of France, and officially proclaimed the royal
Councillor and Physician in Ordinary to the Crown. He charted the future
of French Kings, Henri II and his sons, discovered the founder of the
next dynasty, the ten-year old Henri de Bearn, recognized a future
Pope, and composed a history of mankind's possible and alternate futures
in the Green Language of the Hermetic adept. And he accomplished all
this without having his work placed on the newly developed Index of
prohibited books, or even running afoul of the Inquisition. That alone
shows that Nostradamus had many friends in powerful places.
Whatever we make of his prophecies, there can
be no doubt that they have continued to fascinate us. Each era has seen the reflection of
its own time and problems in Nostradamus' enigmatic verses, but he
was right enough, often enough, with his predictions that our fascination
is warranted. From a historical perspective, we can see Nostradamus
as part of a reformation movement, not just within the church or the
state, but an attempt to chart out the reformation of the human spirit
through the vehicle of time. Nostradamus saw himself in the larger
tradition of the Old Testament prophets and others such as the Sybils
of ancient Rome and the more recent Joachim of Flores. But, and here's
the important twist, he also saw himself as a man of the renaissance,
a man of science, pragmatic and empirical. His prophetic abilities
were to him a kind of future science, known to the ancients, dimly
reconstructed by the scholars of his era, but surely to be perfected
sometime in the long reach of human history. In that sense, we can
see his Prophecies as an attempt to communicate not just across time,
but across levels of awareness as well.
The mystery of Nostradamus is ultimately the
mystery of the region itself, the ancient empire of the Sun. From the Druid Seers of Les
Baux, the philosophers and early Christians of Glanum, to the Merovingians
origins of St. Remy, the Magi of Les Baux, the Cathars, the Kabbalah,
the Templars and the legends of the Grail, Nostradamus' vision rested
on a solid basis of local myth and tradition. For example, just out
Nostradamus' back door in Salon-de-Provence, where he would have to
have seen it everyday, is the Eglise St. Michel-de-Apocalypse. On its
arched tympanum we find not just St. Michel holding the sealed book
of esoteric knowledge, but also posing as Ophiucus, the serpent holding
esoteric 13th sign of the zodiac marking the center of the galaxy.
Below his central figure is a lamb and shofar horn, the horn of judgment,
beneath a Templar cross. Around these central figures are "Green" language
images of the Tree of Life along with the Merovingian fleur-de-lis.
Nostradamus had but to take a walk in the evening to contemplate, on
one church front, the deepest core of his philosophy.
With all that in mind, Nostradamus’ six quatrains about
his native region become even more important. Could Nostradamus’ quatrains
point to the secret connecting all of the unique spiritual and historical
threads that come together at St. Remy? And could that secret have
been known, and painted, a generation before Nostradamus by one of
the world’s greatest artist, Leonardo Da Vinci? Unveiling that
hidden secret leads us directly to the story at the heart of the Grail
myth, allowing us to see beyond the shadowy outlines of history. The
legends and the romances play their part, shining light on pieces of
the puzzle, but without the key understanding left by Da Vinci and
later Nostradamus, the central component of the larger story would
be missing.
Three
Here are Nostradamus’ six quatrains, all focusing on
the area around the ruins of Glanum:
NostradamusIV/27:
Salon, Mansol, Tarascon of the arch of Sextus
Where the pyramid is still standing
They will come to deliver the prince of Annemarc
Redemption is dishonored in the temple of Artemis.
V/57:
There will go forth from mount Gaulsier and the Aventine
One who through the hole will warn the army
The booty will be taken from between two rocks
Of Sextus Mansol, renown will fail.
VIII/34:
After the victory of the lion over Lion
Upon the mountains of Jura a great slaughter,
Floods and dark-skinned ones seventh million
Lion, Elm at Mausole death and the tomb.
VIII/46
Pol mensolee will die three leagues from the Rhone,
Next the two oppressed fled Tarascon
For Mars will make the most horrible throne,
Of the Cock and the Eagle of France, three brothers.
IX/85
To pass Guienne, Languedoc and the Rhone,
From Agen holding Marmande and the Reole:
To open by faith through the king the Phonecian will hold his throne,
Conflict after St Paul de Mauseole.
X/29
De Pol MANSOL in the cavern of goats,
Hidden and seized, pulled out by its beard:
Captive led like a mongrel dog,
By the Begourdans brought near to Tarbes.
In typical fashion, Nostradamus strives for a
certain level of obscurity.
All that we can truly say is that all six refer directly to Glanum
and the St. Paul de Mausole convent/sanatorium. But, there are phrases
that jump out:
“…of the arch of Sextus Where the pyramid is still standing… the
temple of Artemis… from between two rocks Of Sextus Mansol… at
Mausole death and the tomb… MANSOL in the cavern of goats, Hidden
and seized, pulled out by its beard…”
The arch of Sextus still stands at les Antiques
at Glanum, as does
the quarry stone the locals call “les pyramid.” There is
a temple of Diana/Artemis in the ruins of Glanum, which no one in the
16th century knew about, and the two rocks of “Sextus Mansol” suggests
a very real place. But who or what is Sextus Mansol? And why death
and the tomb? A secret object, hidden in the cavern of goats, and pulled
out by its beard? The clues grow stranger, even as a pattern emerges.
Sextus suggests the six pointed star of Solomon, commonly called now
the Star of David, but a perennial symbol of Judaism. And Man and sol,
man of the sun, and even sol(o)man, Solomon. Man of the Son/Sun also
suggests early Christianity and even Mithraism and Sol Invictus, two
close competitors with Christianity in the second and third centuries.
So Nostradamus is implying that some very important relic, perhaps
a tombstone, connected to a Jewish messianic cult figure who was the
Mansol, Solomon, savior, etc. is hidden in the goat caves of the ancient
quarry near Glanum.
Nostradamus hid these clues in his massive Propheties, combining them
with other connections and clues to events that are some how involved
in the “prophecy’s” fulfilment. But we can be fairly
sure that Nostradamus intended these key phrases and images to stand
out. Think of it as the bait…
However, Nostradamus was unaware that a generation
or more before, another visionary artist had also placed some of
these concepts in the geography of Glanum and Les Baux. When we turn to Leonardo Da Vinci,
we find not just a deeper mystery, but the key to its solution as well.
Think of a triangle, with a town and its castle
at each of the points (Avignon, Salon and Arles). There’s a river on two of the three
sides, but the third side drifts so openly toward the marshes of
the south and the sea that the delta might as well be an island.
Across the center of the triangle, almost due east to west, runs
a jagged chain of sharp cliffs and steep valleys known as the Chaine
des Alpilles, the Little Alps. In actuality, they look more like
an Impressionist version of the mountainsides of ancient Greece,
shrunken to a more human scale, and placed like a stage set in the
middle of a rocky plain.
The legends began six thousand years ago when the Neolithic hunters
formed small communities in the safety of the mountain-top caves and
springs at Les Baux and Eygaliere. Around three thousand years ago,
a proto-Celtic civilization developed, one that welcomed the Greek
traders who arrived half a millennium later in the 6th century BCE.
Three hundred or so years after that, when Rome arrived in the first
flush of its empire building, the Ligurians were cultured philosophers
who had dwelt in peace so long they had virtually forgotten the art
of war. Rome saved them from the more nomadic Celts sweeping down from
the north, but at the price of their independence. The Salian confederation
of Ligurian tribes was defeated by the Romans and within a generation
the entire region was annexed as Rome's first province, the Provincia
Narbonenis. A century later, Augustus and Julius Ceasar made the roads
back to Rome, and in doing so made Celtic Gaul Roman. The first province,
Provence, quickly became the center piece of the transalpine empire.
St. Remy-de-Provence, where statues of the Virgin
and Child still bless every important street corner, grew from the
ruins of Glanum's destruction. Depopulated first by Diocletian's persecution at the end
of the third century CE, there was little left to sack by the time
the Visigoths arrived in the early fifth century. At the turn of the
sixth century, the area was revitalized and given a new name by one
of those odd quirks of fate that seem to drive the history of the Dark
Ages. The Visigoths made Arelate their new capital and Alaric II proclaimed
himself king of the new empire of the Goths. They were opposed only
by the newly Christianized Merovingian Franks under Clovis. Declaring
that it was against God's will that the fairest portion of Gaul should
be ruled by heretics and heathens, Clovis invaded the south and defeated
Alaric II at the battle of Vouille. In the bargain, he became the master
of southern France all the way to the Pyrenees.
The fortified hilltop villages, such as Eygaliere,
fared better in the next few centuries than did the new towns such
as St. Remy. Hit
hard by the plagues of the sixth century and the Arab invasion of the
eighth, a small measure of stability returned to the region with the
rise of the Carolingians. The area around St. Remy became virtually
independent as a kind of Dark Age city state, and survived in this
form until the rise of the Lords of les Baux in the middle of the tenth
century CE.
At the height of their power and influence, the Lords of Les Baux
ruled roughly one hundred villages and hilltop keeps on both sides
of the Alpilles and by the late twelfth century had taken on a role
in international power politics. Their support encouraged Frederick
I Barbarossa in his end-run around the Roman church, resulting in his
1179 coronation as King of Arles. The facade of St. Trophime in Arles,
designed and sculpted for the occasion, has a frieze depicting the
entire story of the Magi as a direct nod to the influence of the Lords
of les Baux. It was also the time of the Troubadours, who sang at the
courts of love held in Les Baux, Romanin and Roquemartine, and the
Cathar heresy, which the Lords of les Baux embraced, as well as the
first appearance in written form of the Kabbalah, the transcendent
light mysticism of the Jews, whom the Lords of les Baux held as being
under their direct protection. The troubadour cited as the source by
Chretein de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach for the original Grail
legend, one Guyot de Provence, was a vassal of the Lords of les Baux,
and it is therefore not unusual to find images and motifs from the
Grail Romances springing to mind as one contemplates the fortress of
Les Baux.
Within a generation, a mere thirty years after
Frederick I’s
coronation in Arles, all would be on the verge of ruin, as first the
Pope and then the French King launched crusades against the heretics
of the south. After invasion and inquisition came the first waves of
the Black Death, and the Lordship of les Baux passed to the Counts
of Provence. In the fifteenth century, this was Good King Rene D'Anjou,
who gave Les Baux to his second wife, the beloved Queen Jeanne. It
is fitting that in its final days of independence, Les Baux was ruled
by a Queen. After her death, King Louis XI of France destroyed the
fortifications, but Les Baux continued to be an important fiefdom.
In the sixteenth century, it passed to the Marechal of France, Anne
de Montmorency. With the good Marechal, we arrive in the time of the
region's most famous historical figure, Michel de nostra domina, or
Nostradamus, who was introduced at the court of Catherine Di Medici
by Montmorency. The sixteenth century was a crucial point in the history
of France and Europe, and Nostradamus was part of all the diverse intellectual
currents of the era. Within his lifetime, his influence would begin
to shape the events of European power politics, and after his death
his shadow would continue to haunt the future, touching even our more
rational age.
At fifteen, young Michel departed for the university
school at Avignon,
the scene of the French Captivity of the Church in the fourteenth century
and still the center of the region's intellectual life in the sixteenth
century. In September 1521, his studies interrupted by an outbreak
of the plague, Michel left Avignon and began his first period of wandering.
By 1529, he was in Montpelier where he applied for admission to the
medical school. One of his fellow students, the already famous humanist
Francois Rabelais, Latinized Michel's surname as Nostradamus. Nostradamus
never received his doctorate, and by the early 1530s he had settled
in Agen, in southwestern France, in order to study with the Italian
humanist Julius Ceasar Scaliger. Nostradamus married a local girl,
and quickly had two children. But disaster struck, and both his new
wife and their two children died of the plague. By 1534, Nostradamus
was on the move again.
Of all of Nostradamus' mysterious periods of
wanderlust, these last journeys to Italy are perhaps the most odd. He married Anne, bought
and began to refurbish a house in Salon, and then left for a two-year
excursion. It is hard not to consider that he was in some way summoned
to Italy, or at least compelled by reasons more powerful than just
gathering recipes for his book on cosmetics. His old friend Rabelais
was in Italy, and may have been the source of the invitation. Nostradamus
alludes in his later works to collecting a number of volumes on occult
philosophy, during this trip and his later visit in 1555 - 56, that
would later serve as the source of his magickal practices. Soon after
the election of Pope Julius III in 1550, Nostradamus returned to Salon-de-Provence
and began the work that would make him famous for the next half a millennium.
Whatever we make of his prophecies, there can
be no doubt that they have continued to fascinate us. Each era has seen the reflection of
its own time and problems in Nostradamus' enigmatic verses, but he
was right enough, often enough, with his predictions that our fascination
is warranted. From a historical perspective, we can see Nostradamus
as part of a reformation movement, not just within the church or the
state, but an attempt to chart out the reformation of the human spirit
through the vehicle of time. Nostradamus saw himself in the larger
tradition of the Old Testament prophets and others such as the Sybils
of ancient Rome and the more recent Joachim of Flores. But, and here's
the important twist, he also saw himself as a man of the renaissance,
a man of science, pragmatic and empirical. His prophetic abilities
were to him a kind of future science, known to the ancients, dimly
reconstructed by the scholars of his era, but surely to be perfected
sometime in the long reach of human history. In that sense, we can
see his Prophecies as an attempt to communicate not just across time,
but across levels of awareness as well.
With all that in mind, Nostradamus’ six quatrains about
his native region become even more important. Could Nostradamus’ quatrains
point to the secret connecting all of the unique spiritual and historical
threads that come together at St. Remy? And could that secret have
been known, and painted, a generation before Nostradamus by one of
the world’s greatest artist, Leonardo Da Vinci? Unveiling that
hidden secret leads us directly to the story at the heart of the Grail
myth, allowing us to see beyond the shadowy outlines of history. The
legends and the romances play their part, shining light on pieces of
the puzzle, but without the key understanding left by Da Vinci and
later Nostradamus, the central component of the larger story would
be missing.
There will go forth from mount Gaulsier and the Aventine
The arch of Sextus still stands at les Antiques
at Glanum, as does
the quarry stone the locals call “les pyramid.” There is
a temple of Diana/Artemis in the ruins of Glanum, which no one in the
16th century knew about, and the two rocks of “Sextus Mansol” suggests
a very real place. But who or what is Sextus Mansol? And why death
and the tomb? A secret object, hidden in the cavern of goats, and pulled
out by its beard? The clues grow stranger, even as a pattern emerges.