Gargoyles' Liberation Front

Gargoyles' Liberation

April 16, 2019

Today the Gargoyles of the earth are violently revolting against the circumstances which have left most of them bound in stone.

 

Long ago, in France, England, and some parts of Germany, a guild of stonemasons began the work of raising some extremely impressive cathedrals. These gentlemen of the stonemason’s guild were not altogether unlearned. While they had no knowledge of calculus, it required a significant array of tactical engineering skills to raise up the graceful arches of a Gothic cathedral. Indeed, there were a few instances in which the masons overestimated the capacity of their stonework, and great artifices of flamboyant architecture collapsed, to the horror of all of the faithful.

Nevertheless, to a great extent, the early history of technical arts in the West is the history of technical guilds like those of the 12^th and 13^th century stonemasons. It might be noted that, for their time, these stonemasons had a rather liberal education. Whether or not they had learned to read and write – and most of them had probably not – the journeymen and masters among them found themselves called on to sculpt or imprint in bas-relief, images that would convey to the illiterate masses the import of the principal tales of the Bible. They therefore needed to possess, not only a general familiarity with those tales, but also an understanding of the symbols of Catholic iconography.

Ever since the days of the Magdalenian caves, there has been an understanding by an esoteric few, concerning the primal role played by the labor of artists and the poets in taming the forces of chaos, so that the ordinary people should be able to live normal lives.

In order to appreciate how this consciousness has been maintained among the creative few, it shall be well to consider the labors of those who raised up the great European cathedrals. But in order to grasp the nature of a creative tradition, it shall be necessary to let go of the prejudice which holds that the most important knowledge is that which we can voluntarily retrieve. There is, indeed, a very different knowledge which manifests through the dream – and it is only through this sort of knowledge that we are able to decipher the secrets of the Sacred.
 

Some notion of the significance of the mason’s guild in the evolution of what would become the political consciousness of European nations may be observed in the fact that the national revolutionaries of later centuries would identify themselves as “freemasons.” While some of the guild masters had undoubtedly learned their trade building castles for the Crusaders and thus had connections with the Templars, it would be premature to identify them unreservedly with the culture of the Scottish Rite. In the 12^th Century Jaques de Molay had not yet been burned at the stake. Moreover, the Egyptian trappings of the Scottish Rite had probably been borrowed by the Earl of Huntington from the Ismailis, who had once ruled Egypt but who had, by the time of the 3^rd Crusade, been reduced to a state within a state. Before that 3^rd Crusade was terminated by the treaty of 1192, the Freemasons’ Egyptian symbology would have been unintelligible to even the more learned Europeans.

There was, however, one point of resonance between the stonemasons of Europe and the ancient Egyptians that had developed long before the viscissitudes of the 3^rd Crusade. This was the conviction that Sacred Truth can best be expressed through a vocabulary of symbols which almost develops its own grammar.

Each saint each had his own tale, but all of of these stories had some lesson to offer the tradesman. When they were entreated to visit the paintings and the plaster images which enshrined their memories, these saints were enabled to speak to the imagination of the peoples. This is a practice found often among the religions of civilizations in which only the priests have any degree of literacy.

      The particular creativity of the Gothic mind, however, manifested itself in the creation of wondrous gargoyles, which bore an uncanny resemblance to souls that had been distorted by lifetimes devoted to vice. Technically, it is only a Gargoyle if it has a throat which gurgles. Other similar figures with no connection to the gutter are supposed to be called grotesques. But for our present purposes we can call all of them gargoyles, because all of them have some story of a life so shameful their souls became reduced to mere caricatures of what they could have been. And wherever there is a need for a soul to make this sort of shamefaced confession, one may be sure that there is a throat that will gurgle.

      Mythical protectors in the form of Lions, Snakes (Nagas), Monkeys, and Mythical Creatures have been embodied in the stonework of temples in many parts of the world. But the gargoyles of Notre Dame should also be considered as expressions of a particular spiritual ecology which has evolved in France since the days of the Magdalenian cave painters.

      Since Notre Dame was the shrine of Our Lady, it was quite appropriate that all creatures, including poor purgatorial spirits still shriveled into hideous forms on account of their wicked careers, should find grace and respite in the shadow of Her rose window.

      It may also be noted that the devotion of the folk of the land now called France to Our Lady was already ancient on that day when Mary Magdalene and the Roman centurion she had married first stepped from the Roman transport on to the Greco-Roman dockworks of 1^st Century Marseille. Now that we know that the Minoans at Knossos and Phaistos called their Goddess “Iqe,” we may surmise that Aquitania, which was one of the 3 parts of Caesar’s Gaul, was named for a tribe which had taken their name from “Iqe-Tania.” Tanit was Athena, as she was addressed in the dialect of the Phoenicians who were the ruling families in Carthage.

      The groundbreaking ceremony for the Notre Dame cathedral was held in the the Year of the Christian Lord 1163. The cornerstone was laid by Pope Alexander III in person. Since the Albiginsians were only beginning to be listed as official heretics, the Church had not yet become sullied by the horrors of the inquisition through which this Western variant of Bogomile Christianity would be eventually surpressed.

      But unfortunately, by the time the Cathedral was essentially completed in about 1260, the purity of the Church had been stained by the shedding ofgenocidal quantities of blood. And then, on March 18 of the year 1307, the stonemasons were overwhelmed with smoke, as the Grandmaster of the famous Templar order was burned at the stake in the square of this very cathedral.

We struggle; the world out there

Is brutal, cold, demonic,

And we find that we have been afflicted

By a particular rage.

We struggle with a cold deceitful world.

We had been dazed;

We had hung with Inanna on meat-hooks within the Abyss:

Re-animated now by that vision of horror

We struggle back into the life of this world,

Appalled to witness that Power

Which the Great Lie has attained.

We know the politicians lie –

It is a common sickness.

But from whence came this ugly spectre

Who now has possessed

The very Temple of Healing?

This is a Demon of Night

Pretending to be Lord of the Day:

Quacks now have the law on their side,

Because the policemen have found a new war

And are impatient with the questions of the doctors.

It is a conspiracy of les grands;

The Great Lie presides;

Their object is always to minimize

The true cost to the environment

Of all their abusive behavior.

God may be merciful, but the eco-system

Shall demand reparation,

And the eco-system shall find some way

To extract it.

We therefore discover,

Here in the Temple of Healing,

Doctors who are only policemen,

Lacking in talent to challenge the life-force to rise;

They care not to heal their own blindness,

Much less to straighten

The broken limbs of this world.

Les grands ne nous para ssent pas grands que parce que nous sommes genoux. Levons-nous! – Paris newspaper, 1788.¹

     

1 (The Grand only appear to be great because we are down on our knees. Rise up!) tr Jeremy Pokkin, The French Revolution, p37

ipicture credit: Noemiseh91 (Wikimedia) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]