A terrible tragedy happened yesterday - a fire in Notre Dame Cathedral. This is not just a cathedral, but a place where many different cultural and historical layers are concentrated. Historical events, books, films, even musicals and cartoons - all this is Notre Dame de Paris.
Once upon a time there was an ancient Celtic sanctuary on this site. Then, at the beginning of our era, a Roman temple was built here in honor of the god Jupiter. It was dismantled, and the stones of its foundation became the foundation of a new cathedral.
It is not surprising that this place is surrounded by many legends, including mystical ones. The gates of Notre Dame are decorated with an amazing wrought iron pattern with the same amazing iron locks. They were forged by a blacksmith named Biscorne. Legends say that when the blacksmith learned that he should make a pattern for the most important cathedral in Paris, he turned to the devil. The next day the Canon of Notre Dame saw that the work had already been done, and the blacksmith was lying unconscious. His work was absolutely amazing and impossible for that time, but the blacksmith took her secret to the grave. After that day, he was speechless …
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In the Middle Ages, the temple was considered the Bible for the illiterate: the sculptures on it told the whole history of Christianity - from the Fall to the Last Judgment.
Temple chimeras and gargoyles are the hero of a huge number of mystical legends and myths.
One of them personifies the figure of the alchemist. The alchemist Fulcanelli wrote about him in his book "Mysteries of Cathedrals": “If, pushed by curiosity or just for the sake of an idle walk on a fine summer day, you climb the winding stairs leading to the upper floors of the cathedral, then walk leisurely along the narrow passage of the second-tier gallery. When you reach the corner formed by the column of the northern vault, you will see in the middle of the line of chimeras an amazing bas-relief of an old man, carved out of stone. He is the Alchemist of Notre Dame."
Victor Hugo has called Notre Dame Cathedral "the most satisfactory concise guide to the occult." Legends said that all of its windows, doors, main entrances and the building itself are an allegory of ancient alchemy or hermetic philosophy. For a long time, Hugo collected the secrets and legends of the cathedral, as a result of which his novel "Notre Dame Cathedral" was born, which is still loved by many.
The embodiment of evil in the novel is the priest Claude Frollo, who tried to unravel the mystery of the central part of the cathedral - the symbolic portal. Frollo “even put his soul at stake in order to take part in a mystical meal of alchemists, astrologers and hermeticists at the table, which was headed in the Middle Ages by Averroes, Guillaume Parisian and Nicola Flamel, and from the other side - lost in the East and illuminated the seven-branched candlestick Solomon, Pythagoras and Zoroaster."
Interestingly, another iconic character, the hunchback Quasimodo, had a real prototype, a contemporary of Hugo. In the cathedral, a gloomy and unsociable hunchback worked as a bricklayer, who captured the imagination of the writer and entered the history of world literature.
Hugo wrote prophetic words in his novel: “And now there is nothing left of the mysterious word carved in the wall of the cathedral's gloomy tower, nor of that unknown fate, which this word so sadly denoted - nothing but a fragile memory that the author of this book devotes to them. Several centuries ago, a person who had written this word on the wall disappeared from among the living; the word itself disappeared from the wall of the cathedral; perhaps the cathedral itself will soon disappear from the face of the earth”…
Notre Dame Cathedral, Victor Hugo.
Author: Natalia Trubinovskaya