Language of the Birds

Excerpt from: The dwellings of the philosophers by Fulcanelli Master Alchemist

Time, which ruins and devours human work, has not spread the old hermetic language. Indifference, ignorance, and oblivion have completed the disintegrating action of centuries. Nevertheless, one could not maintain that it has been lost completely; a few initiates preserve its rules and know how to make advantage of the resources it offers in the transmission of secret truths or use it as a mnemonic key to teaching.

In the year 1843, conscripts assigned to the 46th Infantry Regiment in garrison in Paris could every week meet a rather unusual professor crossing the courtyard of the Louis-Philippe barracks. According to an eyewitness --- one of our relatives, a non-commissioned officer at the time, who assiduously followed his lessons --- he was a man still young, carelessly dressed, with long hair falling in curls on his shoulders, who very expressive physiognomy bore the imprint of a remarkable intelligence. In the evening he taught the soldiers who desired it the history of France for a small sum, and he used a method which he insisted was known since the oldest antiquity. In reality, this class, so seductive for its students, was based on the traditional phonetic cabala (9).

A few examples, chosen among the ones that we remember, will give a rough idea of the process.

After a short preamble on approximately ten conventional signs, destined by their form and their grouping to help retrieve all historical dates, the professor drew on the blackboard a very simplified drawing. This image, which was easily engraved on the memory, was in a way the complete symbol of the reign studied.

The first of these drawings showed a man standing up in top of a tower and holding a torch in his hand. On a horizontal line representing the ground, three accessories were placed next to each other: a chair, a cross, a plate. The explanation of the drawing was simple. That which the man was raising in his hand was used as a beacon --- beacon in hand or in French, phare a mains, phonetically identical to the name Pharamond (10). The tower supporting him signified the number 1: Pharamond was, it is said, the first King of France. Finally, the chair, a hieroglyph of the number 4, the cross, that of the number 2, and the plate, sign of zero, gives the number 420, presume date of the crowning of the legendary king.

Clovis, we did not know it, was one of those scamps who could only be controlled with strong means Turbulent, aggressive, bellicose, quick to break everything, he thought of nothing but mischief and fights. His good parents, as much to subdue him as to give a measure of prudence, had screwed him onto his chair. The entire court knew that he was held by a screw (11). The chair and the two hunting horns placed on the ground provided the date 466.

Clotaire, of an indolent nature, promenaded his melancholy in a field surrounded by walls; the unfortunate was thus closed in his land (12) --- Clotaire.

Chilperic --- we don’t know why --- was writhing in a frying pan like a simple catfish, screaming out of breath: I am dying here! (13), hence Chilperic.

Dagobert, putting on the bellicose appearance of a warrior, brandished a dagger and was clothed in a mail, hence Dagobert (14).

Saint Louis --- who would have thought? --- highly esteemed the polish and shine of freshly minted golden coins; he spent his free time melting his old louis (the coin of the period) in order to have new ones (15) which also stands for Louis Neuf: Louis IX.

And as for the little corporal --- grandeur and decadence --- his blazon needed no character. A table covered with a tablecloth and supporting an ordinary saucepan were enough to identify him --- Napolean (16).

Without completely abandoning these linguistic artifices, the old masters, in the composition of their treatises, used hermetic cabala above all, which they also called the language of the birds, of the gods, the gay science, or the gay knowledge (23)

The language of the birds is a phonetic idiom solely based on assonance. Therefore, spelling, whose very rigorousness serves as a check for curious minds and which renders unacceptable any speculation realized outside the rules of grammar, is not taken into account. "I am only attached to useful things", says St Gregory in the 6th century in a letter which serves as a preface to his Morals, "without caring about style or the use of prepositions or endings, since it is not worthy of a Christian to subject the words of the Scriptures to the rules of grammar". This means that the sense of sacred books is not literal and that it is essential to know how to recover their spirit through cabalistic interpretation, as is the custom for understanding alchemical works. The rare authors who have spoken of the language of the birds give it first place in the origin of languages. Its antiquity would go back to Adam who, according to the command of god, would have used it to impose suitable names, appropriate to define the characteristics of created beings and things. De Cyrano Bergerac (26) gives an account of this tradition when, as a new inhabitant of a world near the sun, hermetic cabala is explained to him by "a naked little man seated on a stone", an expressive figure of simple, naked truth seated on the natural stone of the philosophers.

"I do not remember if I spoke to him first", says the great Initiate, "or if he was the one who questioned me; but I have a very fresh memory, as if I were still hearing hem, of how he talked to me for three long hours in a language which I know I had never heard and which bears no relationship with any language of this world, but which I understand more quickly and more intelligibly than that of my wet nurse. He explained to me, when I inquired about such a marvelous thing, that in sciences there was a truth, beyond which we always found ourselves away from simplicity, and that the more an idiom strayed from this truth the more it went below our conception and became more difficult to understand. Similarly", he continued, "in music this truth is never encountered without our soul, immediately elevated, blindly going for it. We don’t see it but we sense that Nature sees it; without being able to understand how it absorbs us, it cannot but delight us, although we cannot know where it is. And it is the same thing with languages. Whoever encounters this truth of letters, of words, and of continuity can never, while expressing himself, fall below conception: his speech is always equal to his thoughts; and because you do not have knowledge of this perfect language, you do not know what to say, not knowing the order or the words which could express what you imagine". I told him that the first man of our world indubitably used this language, since each name that he imposed on each thing declared its essence. He interrupted me and continued: "This language is not simply necessary to express everything that the mind conceives, but without it we cannot be understood by all. Since this idiom is the instinct or the voice of Nature, it must be understandable by everything that lives in the midst of Nature. This is why, if you knew it, you could communicate and disclose all your thoughts to animals, and animals to you all of theirs (27), because it is the very language of Nature by which she makes herself understood by all animals. Therefore be no longer surprised by the ease with which you understand the meaning of a language which your ears have never heard. When I speak, your soul encounters, with each one of my words, the Truth that is gropingly looking for; and although its reason does not understand it, it has within it a nature which cannot but understand it".

However, this secret, universal, indefinite language, in spite of the importance and the truth of its expression, is in reality of Greek origin and genius, as our author teaches us in his History of the Birds. He has some very old oak trees speak --- an allusion to the language which the Druids used ( [*78-1] --- Druidai, from [*78-2] --- Drys, oak) --- in this manner: "Think of the oak trees which we feel you are looking at: it is we who are speaking to you, and if you are astonished that we speak the language used in the world whence you come, know that our first fathers are natives of it. They lived in Epire, in the forest of Dodona, where their natural goodness moved them to give oracles to the afflicted people who consulted them. For this purpose, they had learned the Greek language, the most universal then in existence, so as to be understood". Hermetic cabala was known in Egypt, at least by the priestly caste, as shown by the invocation of the Leyden Papyrus: "I invoke you, the most powerful of gods who has created everything, you born of yourself, who sees everything, without being seen... I invoke you under the name you possess in the language of the birds, in that of hieroglyphics, in that of the Jews, in that of the Egyptians, in that of the cynocephales... in that of the sparrow hawks, in the hieratic language". We also find this idiom among the Incas, sovereigns of Peru until the time of the Spanish conquest; the ancient writers called it lengua general (universal language), and lengua cortesana (language of the court), that is, diplomatic language, since it contains a double meaning corresponding to a double science, one apparent, the other profound ( [*78-3] diple, double, and [*78-4], mathe, science). "The cabala", says Abbot Perroquet (28), "was an introduction to the study of all sciences".

In presenting us the powerful figure of Roger Bacon, whose genius shines in the intellectual firmament of the 13th century like a star of the first magnitude, Armand Parrot (29) describes by what labor he was able to acquire the synthesis of ancient languages and how he possessed such a wide practice of the mother language that he was capable of using its techniques to teach in a very short time languages reputed to be the most difficult. One will admit that therein lies a truly marvelous particularly of this universal language which appears to us to be both the best key to the sciences and the most perfect method of humanism. "Bacon", the author writs, "knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic; thereby putting himself in a position to draw a rich education from ancient literature, he had acquired a reasoned knowledge of the two common languages which he needed to know, that of his native country and that of France. From these specific grammars a mind such as his could not but ascend to a general theory of language; he had opened for himself the two sources for which they flow and which are, on the other hand, a positive composition of several idioms and, on the one hand, the philosophical analysis of human understanding, the natural history of its faculties and concepts. Thus we find him almost alone in his century, applying himself to comparing vocabularies, bringing syntaxes together, looking for the relationships of language with thought, measuring the influence that character, movements, and such varied forms of discourses exert on the habits and the opinions of people. In this manner, he traced it back to the origins of all the simple or complex, fixed or variable, true or erroneous notions which the spoken word expressed. This universal grammar seemed to him to be true logic and the best philosophy; he attributed so much power to it that with the aid of such a science he believed he was capable to teach his young disciple, Jean de Paris, in one year what had taken him forty".

"Striking speed of education of common sense! Strange power", said Michelet, "to draw out, along with the electric spark, the preexisting science from man’s brain".

(9) The word cabala is a deformation of the Greek [***] (karbau), one who jabbers or speaks a barbaric language.

(10) There is here absolute identity of figuration and meaning with the cabala expressed in prints from old works, in particular The Dream of Polyphilo. In it King Solomon is always represented by a hand holding a willow branch (in French willow in hand: saule a main is phonetically close to Solomon. A daisy in French marguerite sounds like I am missed. It is in this manner that one should analyze Pantagruel’s and Gargantua’s saying and ways of speech, if one wants to understand all that is inherent in the work of the powerful initiate that Rabelais was.

(11) Held by a screw, in French, "clos-a-vis", which sound very much like Clovis.

(12) Enclosed in his land, in French "clos dans sa terre", or Clotaire.

(13) I am dying here, in French "j’y peris" which sounds close to Chilperic

(14) Dagger and mail, in French dague and haubert sound like Dagobert.

(15) Louis the Ninth can sound in French both like new louis (coins) or Louis Nine.

(16) Tablecloth and saucepan in French, nappe et poelon --- Napoleon.

(23) Translator’s note: Reference to Rabelais’ and later to Nietzsche’s writings.

(26) De Cyrano Bergerac, L’Autre Monde. Histoire comique des Etats et Empires du Soleil (The Other World, Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun), Paris, Bauche, 1910. J.J. Pauvert publisher, Paris, 1962, p. 170.

(27) The famous founder of the Order of Franciscans, to which the illustrious Adept Roger Bacon belonged, knew hermetic cabala perfectly well; St Francis of Assisi knew how to speak with birds.

(28) Perroquet, priest. La Vie et le Martyre du Docteur Illumine, le Bienheureux Raymond Lulle (Life and Martyrdom of the Illumined Doctor, the blessed Raymond Lully), Vendome, 1667.

(29) Armand Parrot: Roger Bacon, sa personne, son genie, ses oeuvres et ses contemporains, Paris, A. Picard, 1894, p. 48, 49.