DISCOVERING a hidden keystone, analogous to the mythical search for the Holy Grail, is a motif that runs like a golden thread through many non-mainstream historically-minded books like ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ and its forerunner, ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail,’ as well as Umberto Eco’s ‘Il Pendolo Foucault,’ and Nicolaas Vergunst’s equally far-ranging ‘Knot of Stone,’ subtitled, ‘The day that changed South Africa’s History,’ but in reality much more than just a look at a hostile encounter between Portuguese seafarers and our indigenous people. The above are almost required reading for anyone with an unbiased interest in the idea (to paraphrase Hamlet) that there may be more things in heaven and earth than we dream of (or perhaps not, as Eco seems to imply). A short book in a similar vein (with a very long title) is Guillaume Brouillard’s ‘Discovering the Keystone: Solving the Riddle of The Red Serpent after 40 Years.’ The author uses a pseudonym which means William Cloud – or son of a Cloud – as he inadvertently (?) reveals to us on the 3rd-last page of his book, where members of the so-called ‘Angelic Society’ are said to be ‘Les Brouillards.’ A recurring theme in all of these books – besides the implied double meaning of symbols and the repetition of significant events – is the age-old quest for a gnosis, a secret kind of knowledge (as Professor Martin Sayer puts it in my fictitious memoir called ‘The 18th Variation’), to counteract the ‘unsettling awareness that one day we’re going to die.’ Martin Sayer, much like Robert Langdon in ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ knows how to interpret old myths and symbols, and in ‘The 18th’ we twice read (in the first and last chapters) about a painting known as ‘The Shepherds of Arcadia,’ by the 17th century artist Nicolas Poussin, which shows the eponymous shepherds contemplating an ambiguously worded inscription on a tomb which says, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego.’ Poussin actually painted a second version of the same scene, which he obviously found very meaningful, and the inscription has been variously interpreted to imply that the person buried there had a pleasant life, or alternatively that they are the words of Death, saying: ‘And even in Arcadia I am present.’ Another view, put forward in ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail,’ and referred to in ‘The 18th Variation,’ is that the phrase could be an anagram meaning: ‘Begone, I contain the Secrets of God.’ A somewhat earlier painting by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (aka ‘Guercino’ – little mouse) shows us those same words written below a skull (allegedly of the murdered Merovingian King Dagobert II), as well as engraved on the same tomb as the one shown in Poussin’s two abovementioned paintings. This particular tomb, near Rennes-le-Château in the French Languedoc, once really existed, but has since been demolished, allegedly to discourage interest in a heretical legend about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, yet the link between the tomb and the mythical Grail has survived in an enigmatically-worded poem called ‘Le Serpent Rouge’ (The Red Serpent), quoted by Brouillard. Translated, the poem partly says: ‘I, like the shepherds of the famous painter Poussin, stood puzzled in front of the enigma of Et in Arcadia Ego. Would the voice of the blood bring forth to me the image of an ancestral past? I now know this fabulous secret.’ At face-value this appears to be anachronistic. Poussin’s paintings only date back to approximately 1630 and 1640, long after the Crusades for instance, and in religious historical terms they are not particularly ancestral at all. The last Templar was burnt at the stake in 1314, more than 300 years earlier. But the Templars supposedly knew a fabulous secret dating back to the alleged treasure of the ‘new’ temple of Solomon, whereas the poem was supposedly written by Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) less than a hundred years ago. If we assume, however – and it seems we must – that the author of the poem, and Poussin and Barbieri, all shared an ancient secret passed on through the ages, it becomes possible to assume that the painters may have purposely hidden a secret code in their paintings, similar to the hidden code Dan Brown ascribes to Da Vinci’s painting of the ‘Last Supper.’
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:57:24 +0000
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