Network X interviews Jay Weidner

Santa Barbara, California January 2004

Network X: It has been a while since we last spoke with you. What have you been up to?

Jay Weidner: I have been very busy since we last spoke together. My wife Sharron Rose (author of the book, The Path of the Priestess) and I have started our own esoteric video production and distribution company called Sacred Mysteries. We also have a web site at www.sacredmysteries.com, which has received over two million hits since it first came out in October 2003. I have made documentary films on people such as the Visionary Artist Alex Grey and Shaman/Healer Alberto Villoldo. I have co-written two books (both with Vincent Bridges). The first one came out in 1999 and is called, A Monument to the End of Time: Alchemy, Fulcanelli and the Great Cross. This year the second book was released by Inner Traditions and is basically the same book with new research. It is now called, The Mysteries of the Great Cross at Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time.

Network X: Are these books about your investigation into the work of the enigmatic alchemist Fulcanelli?

Jay Weidner: Yes, as we have discussed in previous interviews, I have been looking into the Fulcanelli phenomenon for almost 18 years. It started in 1986 when I found the book, The Mystery of the Cathedrals by Fulcanelli at a garage sale in North Hollywood. This minor event began the most important journey of my life. When I first read the book I was amazed by its intelligence, its articulation and its obscurity. I wondered about its anonymous author named Fulcanelli. I was dumbfounded by it and I have continued to reread the book throughout the ensuing years. I still read it every six months or so. Once I found it, the book sat by my bedside for the next five years, its pages slowly curling up from constant use. I became determined in 1991 to uncover all of it’s secrets including the odd chapter at the end called ‘The Cyclic Cross at Hendaye’. In this chapter Fulcanelli speaks of a strange cross in a churchyard in the small southwestern coastal town of Hendaye France, built by a mysterious and unknown alchemist over 350 years ago, and that it holds the secrets of the universe. Now that was intriguing to me!

By then I had moved from L.A. to Seattle and was a virtual occupant of the Seattle Metaphysical Library where I spent the next four years attempting to uncover the truth about Fulcanelli, the anonymous author of The Mystery of the Cathedrals. I began reading the works of René Guenon, Julius Evola, R. A. Schwaller De Lubicz, Elphias Levi, Gershom Scholem, Robert Lawlor and any alchemical text or book on French Hermeticism that I could find. The library really helped me out a lot.

Through this research I discovered that the chapter on Hendaye had not been in the original edition of The Mystery of the Cathedrals that was printed in 1926. It was apparently added to the edition that was reprinted in the late 1950’s. This bit of news alarmed me and made me focus on the additional chapter in Fulcanelli’s book on the Cross at Hendaye. It was at this time that I also discovered the essay by one Paul Mevryl concerning the Cross at Hendaye in the book The Fulcanelli Phenomenon by K. R. Johnson. Paul Mevryl’s essay is really a strange mix of disinformation and real facts all thrown together in a science fiction stew that had cooked too long.

By this time though I knew that the Cross at Hendaye was concerned with describing the four ages, the relationship to certain cards in the tarot, that the chapter on Hendaye had been added later and that there had been a huge stink in Europe caused by the publication of the original book and by the enigma of Fulcanelli. The OSS had even been looking for him. His pupil Canseliet had made a secret trip to Spain to meet Fulcanelli in the early 1950’s even though Fulcanelli was supposed to have left this world almost thirty years earlier. I wondered if that was when the additional chapter on Hendaye had been given to Canseliet. The book Al-Kemi written by Andre Vandenbroeck was a complete trashing of Fulcanelli. One of the authors of the best selling book, The Morning of the Magicians claimed that he met Fulcanelli. There was no doubt, it was a real mystery and I was completely hooked

Network X: What year was this?

Jay Weidner: This would now be late 1991. Soon I was to be the host and producer of the radio show Mind Over Matters at KCMU in Seattle. This would interrupt my investigation in some ways and help it in others. Especially later when it came time to actually seek funding for the research. But then, in 1991 and 1992, I didn’t have enough data yet to get anyone interested. The few souls who bothered to listen to my discoveries didn’t think it was enough to get concerned about. I persevered though. My family and friends thought that I had lost my mind. I became obsessed by all of the secrets that the world was hiding, the occult, French Hermeticism but most especially alchemy. So the show Mind Over Matters became a vehicle for the outer fringes of the research that actually began with my investigation into Fulcanelli. I knew that the Cross at Hendaye was telling me that a catastrophe of some kind was going to happen. Fulcanelli clearly tells us that this catastrophe will not only herald the end of the Iron Age but will also be of a celestial nature. Indeed the angry sun face on the Cross indicates that this disaster has something to do with the sun. But I was lost. I had figured out that the bottom pedestal part represented the solar system from our earth’s point of view and that the cross on the column above the pedestal was representing something beyond the borders of our solar system. The questions of how an unknown alchemist working on the cross 350 years ago could know about all of this also amazed me.

Now I also knew that there was another world, of sorts, that lay at right angles to our world. Through all of this research I was beginning to understand the hyper-dimensional nature of our reality. One of my good friends was, and still is, Dr. Juris Kalnins who worked at the UC Berkeley Particle Accelerator in the Bay Area. Through his incredible knowledge I began to understand the dynamics of the hyper dimensional matrix that surrounds us like an invisible veil. Also through my radio show I met many scientists and mystics who were attempting to explain the relationship between these multiple dimensions. I had discussions with Michael Talbot, Stan Tenen, Richard Hoagland, Terence McKenna and many more. It was Terence who first clued me in that the center of the galaxy might be important to the Hendaye work. In 1994, I had a long conversation with him in Seattle concerning alchemy, Fulcanelli and the Cross. Although he was more interested in John Dee, he did point me in the direction of looking at the center of the galaxy in that conversation.

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