Arcadia Discussion Zone

http://whenhernameyouwriteyoublot.blogs ... st_27.html

Gras c’est, d’or c’est

In the prologue to his Gargantua, Rabelais states:

[snip]

[In the perusal of this treatise you shall find another kind of taste, and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will disclose unto you the most glorious sacraments and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth your religion, as matters of the public state, and life economical. – trans. Urquhart]

Readers of Rabelais have over the centuries been fascinated with the idea that the linguistic exuberance of his text encodes secrets to be read only by an initiated élite. The above passage seems to offer a justification for such an approach, which became particularly widespread in the nineteenth century, an age obsessed with the occult, with secret histories and with mystical claptrap of all kinds. One such interpreter, the much and justly maligned Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet (1828-1900), went further than most.

I was put onto the works of Grasset d’Orcet some time ago by an online acquaintance; I had never heard his name mentioned in an academic context, and was entirely unfamiliar with this particular mode of reading Rabelais. But it so happens that his complete works are even now being edited and republished, and I was quite easily able to pick up volume I of his Oeuvres décryptées, which contains his work on Rabelais and on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or rather, Béroalde de Verville’s translation of it, Le Songe de Poliphile. (*)

It’s quite a read.

Grasset d’Orcet’s method in decoding what he calls ‘la langue des oiseaux’ consists in breaking French words and phrases down into their constituent phonemes, then recombining them to form new words and phrases. It is basically a variation on the rebuses or blasons used in devices, in heraldry, and in cathedral decorations. Indeed, Grasset d’Orcet confidently claims that Rabelais’s texts are constructed exactly like Gothic cathedrals.

There are a few different subdialects of this language (bear with me here): the ‘grimoire blanc’ is the blason properly speaking: these must form eight syllable lines in French, which must always end with an ‘L’ sound (Grasset d’Orcet entirely spuriously derives ‘blasonner’ from ‘bé [bien] L assoner’). Then there’s the ‘grimoire noir’, which admits Latin, Greek and Hebrew also. ‘Patelinage’ is a method of expressing the blason with actions instead of words or images. ‘Lanternois’ (‘Lanternish’) does not require the ‘L’ rhymes, and is the most common language Rabelais uses to encode his writing. We are told us as much in Pantagruel Ch 9, when Panurge is asked by Epistemon (in Urquhart’s translation): ‘Do you speak Christian, or the buffoon language, otherwise called Patelinois? Nay, it is the puzlatory tongue, said another, which some call Lanternois.’ Lanternois must be the language spoken in the ‘pays Lanternois’, which makes an appearance in the Quart livre.

So why is Lanternois so similar to middle French (albeit a version with very loose grammar)? Well might you ask, since Grasset d’Orcet contends that it is not just texts written in French that should be decoded in this way but also the symbolism of the visual arts and architecture. And Latin texts also render into French in this way: Louis XIV was the unwitting target of satire when he adopted ‘Nec pluribus impar’ as his device; for in Lanternois, this reads ‘Ne que plus ribaud, sans pair insolence’ [‘There is none more ribald or more insolent’]. The reason is quite simple: it is because French is the language of Freemasonry, and has been since the sixth century, although the ‘langue du blason’ was only widely adopted in the eleventh...

Rabelais’s works are vehicles for the transmission of messages between those initiated into the secrets of freemasonry. Insofar as they deal with ‘l’estat politicq & vie oeconomicque’, they are mainly concerned with the machinations of several prominent court women during the reigns of François I and Henri II – notably Catherine de’ Medici and Diane de Poitiers – and their efforts to take control of the destiny of the French monarchy and Catholicism. Often the historical facts must be manipulated to square with the phonetic constraints of the method. Quite a lot of significance, for example, is given to the fact that Eleanor of Habsburg (second wife of François I) had a particular taste for lobster (homard), sometimes indulging in it to excess.

What I have described as Grasset d’Orcet’s method might appear not dissimilar to another, more everyday linguistic operation, namely, punning. And indeed, that’s pretty much what it is. This page gives a psychoanalytical account of the ‘langue des oiseaux’. Lacan was an inveterate punster in the best Rabelaisian tradition: consider his ‘le nom du père’/’le non du père’/’les non-dupes errent’. Same thing. Grasset d’Orcet’s madness is not so far removed from the post-structuralist manias of the late twentieth century.

The way this all actually works with Rabelais’s texts can be seen from the following example, Grasset d’Orcet’s decoding of the genealogy of Gargantua (Ch 1). Grasset d’Orcet takes a section of text, picks out certain words of significance using some sort of ‘grid’ (whose underlying algorithms are not revealed), then shuffles them around a bit until they form eight-syllable lines all ending (more or less) in ‘L’ sounds (again, according to some mysterious algorithm to which we are not a party); he then smooshes the words together phonetically and ‘translates’ them into French by resolving the sounds differently and altering the vowels.

Retournant à nos moutons, ie vous diz que par un don souverain de dieu nous a esté reservée l’antiquité & genealogie de Gargantua, plus entière que nulle aultre, de dieu ie ne parle, car il ne me appartient, aussy les diables (ce sont les caffars) se y opposent. Et fut trouvée par Iean Audeau, en un pré qu’il avoit près l’arceau gualeau au dessoubz de l’Olive, tirant à Marsay. Duquel faisant lever les fossez, touchèrent les piocheurs de leurs marres, un grand tombeau de bronze long sans mesure: car oncques n’en trouvèrent le bout, parce qu’il entroit trop avant les escluses de Vienne. Icelluy ouvrans en certain lieu signé au dessus d’un goubelet, à l’entour du quel estoit escript en lettres Ethrusques, HIC BIBITUR, trouvèrent neuf flaccons en tel ordre qu’on assiet les quilles en Guascoigne. Des quelz celluy qu’on my lieu estoit, couvroit un gros, gras, grand, gris, ioly, petit, moisy, livret, plus mais non mieux sentent que roses.

Using the grid method, this gives:

Jean Audeau, pré arceau gualeau,
Sous olive, Narsay tirant. airain sépulcre.
Signé Goubelet. Ci l’on boit, latin.
Neuf flacons quillés, mi base livret
Gros, gras, grand, gris, joli,
Petit, moysi, sentant plus ne mieux roses.

Which in Lanternois means:

Janus, dieu pairé arche Gaule,
Seul vénère Saturne, Touraine sépulcre.
Signe: Goubelet, Colon boit, loi tient.
Haine au Faulcon! colombe ose lève haste.
Guerre, gare, Guérin, doit grege loup.
Petit musicien, tient Apollon, marsye.

Which, roughly translated, gives:

‘Janus, double god of the kingdom of the Gauls, the sepulchre of Touraine, reveres none but Saturn, under the sign of the dove that drinks from a goblet. It has this law: hatred of the falcon! May the dove dare to raise its standard, the wolf must keep his flock from war with Guérin. Marsyas takes Apollo for a little musician.’

A further translative operation is required to correctly decode the symbolism of this little message. I choose not to reveal it to you now, since I’m not sure that you’re ready for it yet (Odi profanum vulgus et arceo!). Also, I’m not really sure I have the slightest idea what the bloody hell Grasset d’Orcet’s on about half the time.

The names of Rabelais’s characters are duly decoded for us – but, as with all good systems of symbolization, they do not necessarily always denote the same thing. The name Panurge derives from the Greek ‘panourgos’, or ‘factotum’. But, asserts Grasset d’Orcet, Rabelais only gave the names of his characters the appearance of a Greek derivation, in order to set the pedants on the wrong track. In fact, Panurge in Lanternois signifies simply ‘peint rouge’, and therefore designates the mannerist painter Rosso. Later in the course of his interpretation, Grasset has cause to modify this reading somewhat: after the death of Rosso, Rabelais made Panurge represent Philibert Delorme instead. Later still, in the third and fourth books, Panurge came to designate Henri II (‘pas n’urge’: because he couldn’t get it up). Even later still, we are told that Panurge was a stand in for the printer Sebastian Gryphius. (**) It seems Panurge was made to do quite a bit of semiotic work: ‘factotum’, indeed.

As for Pantagruel, that name designates none other than François I himself (‘Paix ne te guère vale’ or ‘peace avails you nothing’). Gargantua, it follows, was Louis XII, and the name translates as ‘Guère gain tu as’ (‘you win little’, a reference to his not entirely successful Italian campaigns).

[snip]

(*) the man Claude Gagnon suggests actually wrote Nicholas Flamel's Book of Hieroglyphs ... instead of just editing it.

(**) the man Michel Lamy says founded the Angelic Society.

Jan Bäcklund
Grotesque Forms and the Ideology of the Fantastic in Northern Renaissance Art

The hypothesis is that an essential part of the many grotesque forms and conglomerates of members is based on a method of 'writing with pictures'. With a starting point in an interpretation of the medieval marginal illuminations, the aim will be to suggest a radically new possibility in the interpretation of Bruegel's oeuvre. An interpretation, which, if it could be proved valid, would have a significant impact, not only on our understanding of Northern Gothic and Renaissance art and its many applications in tapestries and engravings, but on the general discussion of the word/image relation as well.

It is often stated in scholarly works on the iconography of Bosch and Bruegel that they both stem from the Flemish tradition of manuscript illumination. Since one of the few things we know of Bruegel's early life is that he in the 1550s worked with illumination of manuscripts in Giulio Clovio's studio, a connection between manuscript illumination and, in this case, Bruegel's panels is very probable. Scholars have usually searched after pictorial and stylistical ascendants in the manuscript, with a meager, if any, result. The problem is, I believe, that the possible results of a formal comparision and iconographical genealogy between manuscript illumination and Bruegel's panels are very limited indeed, as the technical and contextual differences are considerable. Instead I would assent to a more functional and structural method of comparision, i.e. in their respective applications of 'writing with pictures'.

My starting point for this hypothesis is unconventional: the French antiquarian and archeologist Grasset d'Orcet (d. 1900), wrote in the 1880s a series of essays on, mainly, Rabelais and Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) in the journal Revue britannique. In these essays he reconstructs a method of drawing - according to him the very art of drawing - which is said to have been common during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when this 'art' was a condition for being accepted as 'franc-ma'tre' in the guilds. This is not the place to discuss Grasset d'Orcet's argument, which by the way is worthless in a scholarly sense as he, in the spirit of his time, never acknowledges from where he has his information. This does not necessarily mean it is false, but the object for me must then be to examine independent sources and documents to test his argument. Most importantly the many books on 'L'art du blason' and Estienne Tabourot's Les Bigarrures du Seigneur des Accords (1583 & 1588).

Two circumstances motivate attention to Grasset d'Orcet's hypotheses. The first is that recent researches in the field of Gothic marginal manuscript illumination to some significant degree seem to corrobate his thesis. Scholarly research on Gothic marginal illumination is new. It commenced with Lilian R. Randall's Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, from 1966, and Gombrich expresses clearly how these were looked upon earlier, when he characterises them as 'an irresponsible imagination on holiday'. Randall's work has since been continued by Michael Camille (especially Image on the Edge. The Margins of Medieval Art, from 1992, where he demonstrates a number of intricate relations between the text's discursive field and the contradictory logic of the grotesque in the margins. This relation is, according to Camille, founded on the Gothic mind's way of 'etymological thinking', i.e. if two words are phonetically identical or similar, their signification also cognate. This application of homonymies is well known in the case of Bruegel. A. Monballieu argued in an article from 1982, how apes (singes) for Bruegel and his time could be used to signify 'seigneurie'; and this phonetical method is the very core of Grasset d'Orcet's argument.

The second reason for considering Grasset d'Orcet's argument again is that his readings and interpretations of some of the woodcuts in the Hypnerotomachia appear as almost straight-forward descriptions of significant scenes in Bruegel's 'Battle between Carnival and Lent', a painting Grasset d'Orcet probably never saw in the original or in any copy, as he seems to be as unaware of Bruegel as the rest of the antiquarian community at this time. This coincident between two independent sources, the central scenes in Bruegel's painting and Grasset d'Orcet's reading of the Hypnerotomachia and Rabelais, could, in my view, prove to be a promising approach to the iconography of Bruegel's fantastic picture. I myself pursued this theme in an analysis of Bruegel's 'Battle between Carnival and Lent' (1559),* where I argue that the iconological program put forth there is a grotesque-comic tournament between the painters' and the masons' guilds. Grotesque, because it 'writes in pictures', comic, because this circular battle, could with reasonable probability, at the same time be seen as a document describing a common program for the artisans' guilds in the Renaissance: a program which seems to be orthodox Christian, but was, nevertheless founded on Pagan myths, and in which aesthetics aimed at 'developing a taste for the fantastic'.

*) 'The World, is it far from Heaven'' -'See for Yourself!' The Battle of Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and François Rabelais' 'Messir Gaster', Aarhus: Center for Cultural Research (Work in Progess 70-98), 1998. Forthcoming in: East & West: European Iconography (ed. György E. Szõnyi).

[snip]

What school did Pieter Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch belong to?

The Flemish school, you say?

Same one as David Teniers the Younger, who was married to a Brueghel grand-daughter ...

Same one as Jan Van Eyck, the (putative) painter of the Portrait of Celestine V ...

You know, I think I read that Peter Scheemakers, the sculptor of the Shugborough Hall Shepherd's Monument, was Flemish.

Kind of weird when you look at all the artwork in Le Mystery other than Poussin, you notice this coincidence.

It almost looks to me like a bit of a tradition.

Hmmm. Is there a different way we should be interpreting these paintings? Maybe instead of just drawing lines on them and hunting for treasure?

http://www.renneslechateau.com/anglais/duboisuk.htm

New Light on Le Vraie Langue Celtique

We have just got our hands on a previously unknown original edition of La Vraie Langue Celtique by Henri Boudet. Amazingly, this example bears the following inscription: "A G. d'Orcet, mon indéfectible amitié. H. Boudet"... [To G. d'Orcet, my constant friend].

Grasset d'Orcet was a student at Juilly college in the Seine et Marne departement. His mentor was Abbé Constant, who later became the famous occultist, Eliphas Lévi. Lévi was employed by the head of the establishment who at this time was Abbé Henri Boisnormand de Bonnechose (1800-1883), who in turn became Bishop of Carcassonne at the time of the Rennes-le-Château affair.

Grasset d'Orcet is known for his numerous works on esoteric matters and mysterious archaeology, but also on cryptography and on phonetic cabala. This link which we have just established with the priest of Rennes les Bains may shed new light on Boudet's works and on the theory that his controversial book was a coded document.

This is definitely something to follow up. A first study on Grasset d'Orcet has been given to us by Dominique Dubois ©

A scholar, archeologist, publicist, historian and philologist, he was born at Aurillac in the Cantal region on the 6 June 1828 and died at Cusset in the Allier region on the 2 December 1900.

Unjustly forgotten during the first part of the 20th century, despite an eloquent obituary in the Revue Britannique (January 1901), he was plagiarised abusively and shamefully by Joséphin Péladan in Le secret des maîtrises, la clé de Rabelais (was Péladan the only one to do this?!). Today Claude-Sosthème Grasset d'Orcet is finally acknowledged as an authority, as testified to by the hermeticists and occultists who have mentioned him in their works. The contents of Grasset d'Orcet's works certainly remain difficult to understand and only address a very limited and well-informed audience. Furthermore, the author creates strange rules for reading his works, which consist mainly of hiding, through the use of apparantly simple phrases, the real meaning of the text. In other words, most of Grasset's works make use of cryptography and also show certain aspects of hermeticism.

We should mention here the first authors who cited Grasset d'Orcet. We think initially of a figure well known to the Theosophists of the belle époque, Isabel Cooper-Oakley (1854-1914), and of her book Mystical Traditions, which was published in a French edition in 1911; then of Paul Vulliaud (1875-1950) and his La Kabbale Juive (1923); Probst-Biraben, a so-called "on the edge" mason who published Rabelais et le secret de Pantagruel in 1949, partly revisiting the work of Péladan. Nevertheless, we had to wait until the 1970's and 1980's until the work of Grasset d'Orcet was finally examined by two alchemists: Eugène Canseliet and his real or imaginary master Fulcanelli, who says of Grasset in his successful book Le Mystère des Cathédrales:

"...We understand that the inscription must be in a secret language, that is to say the language of the gods or language of the birds, and that one must discover its meaning using the rules of Diplomacy. Several authors, and especially Grasset d'Orcet, in his analysis of the Songe de Polyphile..."

Valérie Gentil also presented a thesis at the University of Bordeaux and Bernard Allieu made Grasset d'Orcet his trusty steed in collecting and assembling his Matériaux Cryptographiques, before publishing these as a first volume in 1976. Of course the chapters are dedicated to the Le Noble Savoir, Rabelais and the first four books of the Pantagruel, the gods on the streets, the Gouliards, the Songe de Poliphile, etc... We should also mention Jean-Claude Drouin, who created a very interesting and educational portrait of Grasset d'Orcet in the periodical Politica Hermetica (n°3) published by Jean-Pierre Laurant.

The language of the birds - or language of the gods - made its way through history and influenced certain modern authors in terms of decoding, alchemy and symbolism. Grasset d'Orcet was cited more and more and his special linguistics, in the form of the cabalistic translation of names, was successful. Some people see, or believe that they find his real identity in the works of Fulcanelli! Others, who are more specialised in the mystery of Rennes-le-Château and its priest Bérenger Saunière, put emphasis on Abbé Henri Boudet, a name brought up often in this story, who wrote in 1886 a most curious work, La vraie langue celtique et le Cromleck de Rennes-les-Bains.

Rightly, there are some, believing that there was some hidden message to find in Boudet's work, who asked whether the latter had not been influenced by Grasset d'Orcet. As far as this is concerned, but without a definite answer for the moment, one could have considered a hypothetical link between the two men, but without definite proof it was wiser to not go off into the realms of speculation. Today, finally and for the first time, we have the proof that these two unusual figures knew one another. Better still, on reading the written dedication from Abbé Boudet to Grasset d'Orcet there is mention of a "constant friendship": That is what is stated!

Based on this indisputible fact, we would dare to consider that not everything has yet been told about Boudet and that an aspect of this learned priest of Rennes les Bains remains to be discovered.

As for his book, despite certain controversy amongst those who suggest that the work of the priest shows a total ignorance of philology and those who claim that the Vrai Langue Celtique reveals a system of coding derived from Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), well-known author of Gulliver's Travels and of a book on the Ars Punica [art of punning], we think that he should be looked at differently and properly re-examined. The future will tell us!

One last piece of information, which deserves being mentioned again and which, of course, requires verification, is that Grasset d'Orcet, who certainly deserves a more detailed biography (a study is envisaged for number 2 of the yearly review Historia Occultae), did part of his studies at the college of Juilly (in the Seine et Marne departement). This was during a period when Abbé Constant, the future Eliphas Lévi (1810-1875), was appointed as the mentor or supervisor by Abbé Henri de Bonnechose (1800-1883), future bishop of Carcassonne, Evreux and Rouen.

[snip]

http://vunex.blogspot.com/2007/08/on-et ... art-3.html

The first great hero of this movement was Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, who published his masterpiece, The Hebraic Tongue Restored, in 1815, a year before Bopp's first foray into comparative philology.

I discovered the existence of HTR, of all places, in John Carroll's introduction to his edition of Benjamin Whorf's Language and Reality—in which Carroll notes Whorf's interest in the theories of Fabre d'Olivet and James Byrne (1820-1897) (*), which is not too surprising, given Whorf's vaguely mystical proclivities. HTR is a really fun book, and weaves the sound-symbolism of de Brosses (via his successor Antoine Court de Gébelin) into a translation of, and commentary on, Genesis 1.1—9.29.

[snip]

Fabre d'Olivet engages in Isidorean analysis and etymological play, as well, such as this, from his footnote to Hebrew thebah, 'ark' (also the boat of rushes in which Moses was placed by his mother):

It has so many significations that it is difficult to assign a definite one. It is, on the one hand, the symbolic name given by the Egyptians to their sacred city, Theba, considered as the shelter, the refuge, the abode of the gods. . . The name of Paris, I say, is only the name of the Thebes of Egypt and of Greece, that of ancient Syparis, of the Babel of Assyria, translated into the tongue of the Celts. It is the vessel of Isis, (Bar-Isis) that mysterious ark, which, in one way or another, carries over the destinies of the world, of which it is the symbol.

(Note: the connection of Paris to Sybaris would be repeated in Hugo's 1862 Les Misérables: I do not know if he had it from Fabre d'Olivet, or from an intermediary source, or from a tradition antedating the arcanist, or if he simply arrived at it independently.)

Fabre d'Olivet's innovation, as far as I can tell, was to translate the Isidorean idiom into the burgeoning culture of arcanism. I am not aware of an earlier work, and certainly not in the modern world—with a growing knowledge of Oriental languages and their history—that so thoroughly applies a (spurious) analysis of etymological roots to the mystical study of a text. I am reminded somewhat of mediaeval commentaries on Vergil, but the etymologising in those texts (sibyllus from Greek sios (= 'theos') boulos, 'divine counsel') is still primitively Isidorean and piecemeal. Fabre d'Olivet is Chateaubriand bullshit.

And The Hebrew Tongue Revealed must have been a beacon for the arcanists of the later nineteenth century—for Grasset d'Orcet on Rabelais, for Henri Boudet on Celtic and Rennes-les-Bains, for Jean-Pierre Brisset on the origin of language, and for Fulcanelli on French cathedrals and alchemy. I own all these books (except Grasset d'Orcet), so I know whereof I speak when I say that it's all much the same, with variations. I regret to have led you thus far and offer you in the end only a melancholy aporia. But there it is. Fin de siècle.

In his Grasset d'Orcet piece, Raminagrobis writes:

Lacan was an inveterate punster in the best Rabelaisian tradition: consider his 'le nom du père'/'le non du père'/'les non-dupes errent'. Same thing. Grasset d’Orcet’s madness is not so far removed from the post-structuralist manias of the late twentieth century.

When I met Raminagrobis a fortnight ago—and I was stunned to discover that it is in fact his real name—I said, over drinks in a Cambridge pub, a fine bright day, and over my copy of Fulcanelli, which I had brought to read on the bus, that I thought one could make a bolder statement than 'not so far removed'. I speculated that there was a direct lineage from Grasset d'Orcet and Fulcanelli (and therefore from Fabre d'Olivet, de Brosses, and so on) to Lacan, Derrida and the postmoderns. Lacan, after all, was an affiliate of the Surrealists in the 1930s and 40s. He married Bataille's widow Sylvia in 1963—Bataille, who was a prime source of pseudo-arcanist punning among the Surrealists. Lacan knew Bréton, who knew Canseliet, and who had included Brisset in his Anthology of Black Humour. Duchamp was another link in the chain, as were Freud and Jung—the one fascinated by puns and antiphrasis, the other by arcanism. Many more such connections could easily be established. But we have lost our way—we are groping with black words in fields increasingly white, opaqued. Now and then we see a sign, comme dans un steppe de Russie, un feu de voyageurs abandonné sur la neige, and it is, perhaps, Theodore Thass-Thienemann's The Subconcious Language, which accompanies Freud and Jung into the wastelands, a shaman dowsing amid innumerable sastrugi.

Was it Lacan, first among equals, who carried the arcanist-Surrealist etymologics across the border, into the academy? For now I see it, all the time. The noble art of Plato, Varro, Isidore, of de Brosses, Whiter, Horne Tooke, of Fabre d'Olivet, Grasset d'Orcet, Fulcanelli—has become in the hands of academic zealots a coin debased, a joke worthy only of groans.

[snip]

I always knew there was a reason I was fascinated by postmodernism.

(*) Benjamin Lee Whorf formulated the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, of which I've been discussing quite a bit, this semester.

Antoine Fabre d'Olivet (December 8, 1767-March 25, 1825) was a French author, poet, and composer whose biblical and philosophical hermeneutics influenced many occultists, such as Eliphas Lévi and Gerard Encausse (Papus), and René Guénon. D'Olivet spent his life pursuing the esoteric wisdom concealed in the Hebrew scriptures, Greek philosophy, and the symbolism of many ancient cultures as far back as ancient India, Persia, and Egypt. His writings are considered classics of the Hermetic tradition. His best known works today are his research on the Hebrew language, the present volume (The Hebraic Tongue Restored), his translation and interpretation of the writings of Pythagoras (The Golden Verses of Pythagoras), and his writings on the sacred art of music. In addition to the above works, Hermetica has published in consistent facsimile format for its Collected Works of Fabre d'Olivet series Cain and The Healing of Rodolphe Grivel, as well as Hermeneutic Interpretation of the Origin of the Social State of Man and the Destiny of the Adamic Race. D'Olivet's mastery of many ancient languages and their literatures enabled him to write (in the time of Napoleon) this extraordinary text which remains a landmark investigation of the deeper esoteric undercurrents at work in the history of culture. In this prodigious work, which first appeared in 1815, Fabre d'Olivet goes back to the origin of speech and rebuilds upon a basis of truly colossal learning the edifice of primitive and hieroglyphic Hebrew, bringing back the Hebraic tongue to its constitutive principles by deriving it wholly from the sign, which he considers the symbolic and living image of the generative ideas of language. Fabre d'Olivet had found that what is called today the Hebraic tongue is only a colorless simulation of the tongue of the mysteries, and that in finding again this mysterious language one would hold at last the key of all cosmogonies. Drawing upon the resources acquired by his exhaustive studies of Chinese, Sanskrit, Samaritan, Chaldaic, Syriac, Arabic, and Greek, he restored the tongue of the mysteries. Part First: Introductory Dissertation, Hebraic Grammar, and Series of Hebraic Roots. Part Second: Preliminary Discourse and Cosmogony of Moses.

[snip]

Ahh look. Here 'tis. Part of it, anyway.

http://tinyurl.com/yhxqq46

Ahhh, so the next link I'm looking for is there.

http://www.rene-merle.com/article.php3?id_article=505

René Merle, « Boudet et la phonétique », Introduction aux « Remarques sur la phonétique du dialecte languedocien » de l’abbé Boudet.


Les Cahiers de Rennes-le-Château, spécial H.Boudet, 4, 1985
L’abbé Boudet (1837-1915), curé de Rennes-le-Château (Aude) est sans doute plus connu par son rôle dans la célèbre affaire du trésor, qui continue à passionner tant d’ésotéristes. Il ne sera question ci-dessous que de ses intérêts linguistiques.

Comme tant d’autres prêtres en cette fin du XIX° siècle, l’abbé Boudet s’intéresse à la langue d’Oc, et tout particulièrement aux parlers de sa région : le dialecte languedocien, dont la zone d’extension est beaucoup plus vaste, est évoqué ici dans un cadre départemental, (qui ne correspond pas, évidemment, aux divisions des isoglosses), pour la simple commodité de la communication à la Société savante de Carcassonne (1893).

L’implantation du Félibrige, d’une part, l’intérêt du monde savant pour la langue d’Oc de l’autre, ont déculpabilisé beaucoup de petits notables, d’enseignants, d’ecclésiastiques. _ Dorénavant, c’est avec intérêt, et même fierté, qu’ils considèrent la langue encore pratiquée majoritairement par le monde des villages.

Boudet n’est pas de ceux qui versifient, qui racontent ou se racontent. Il n’apparaît pas dans le « Parnasse » des écrivains occitans de l’Aude. Son intérêt pour la langue, pour circonstanciel et daté qu’il soit, procède sans doute d’une interrogation plus indirecte que celle du Félibre sur son parler, ses origines et son avenir. Quelques années auparavant, Boudet avait tenté de fonder une filiation celtique de la langue d’Oc, renouant ainsi avec une tradition très forte avant la Révolution, quand nombre de linguistes, et non des moindres, tentèrent la même démonstration.

Raynouard et ses études sur les Troubadours marquèrent, après l’Empire, le début d’une étape nouvelle, où la langue est correctement étudiée dans son origine latine. Tout le mouvement comparatiste du XIX* devait approfondir cette démarche et dégager les lois phonétiques de transformation du latin en occitan, français, etc...

La communication de Boudet à la Société des Arts et des Sciences de Carcassonne montre que Boudet connaît nombre de ces auteurs et sait manier leurs « lois ». D’ailleurs, la quasi totalité des étymologies qu’il avance, et les processus qu’il étudie, s’inscrivent effectivement dans la filiation latine.

Mais le prêtre, donc le latiniste, qu’est Boudet, ne peut s’en tenir à cette démarche logique. La référence au latin est constamment doublée d’une autre référence, anglo-saxonne, germanique, qui réinstalle sans trop le dire, la langue d’Oc dans un champ de filiation brouillé. La netteté des filiations latines est appuyée d’une comparaison volontariste, relevant de l’intuition plus que de la preuve, avec des parlers plus étranges, plus primitifs. L’intérêt de l’article, qui sans cela ne serait qu’une bon catalogue plus descriptif que vraiment explicatif, est dans cette démarche sous-jacente. On sent que chez Boudet, la langue d’Oc, de par son antériorité par rapport au français et de par sa vie hors institutions, hors usage « codifié », depuis des siècles, est un intercesseur plus opérant avec le mystère des origines de la Parole.

En cela, Bourdet, peut-être à son corps défendant, s’inscrit dans la lignée ésotérique d’un Fabre d’Olivet avec lequel il partage la même interrogation sur le celtique et la même admiration devant l’hébreu. En écrivant et en publiant La langue hébraïque restituée, Fabre d’Olivet voulait fonder l’étude de la Parole et des langues qui peuvent y conduire. En écrivant un peu plus tard La Langue d’Oc restituée, qu’il ne put faire publier, Fabre voulait compléter sa démarche par l’étude et la présentation d’une langue qui, à la différence de l’hébreu, ne se fonde pas sur le Monument de ses œuvres, mais sur la pratique dégradée et péjorée d’un peuple paysan. Par les deux voies contradictoires et complémentaires, il comptait percer le mystère du fondement de la Parole, et de son Sens.

Boudet, bon connaisseur des parlers occitans, ne serait-ce que par la nécessité du contact sacerdotal, est aussi, un parmi tant d’autres, de ces tourmentés qui ne peuvent accepter la disparition inéluctable de la langue d’Oc sans comprendre le sens de son apparition et de sa spécificité. Son amateurisme linguistique peut à certains égards faire sourire. Il ne s’en inscrit pas moins dans une démarche complexe de réévaluation collective et de ressourcement personnel.

[snip]

As I suspected -- perhaps Boudet was also familiar with Olivet's work in HTR.

Tell it to Flemish Primitive who is like an unseen Yeti on this forum and watching us.
Is it the "holy blood tradition" or even the "grail"?
http://www.rlcresearch.com/2009/04/16/bruges/

More about Claude "Grass and Gold" Sosthene :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Sosth%C3%A8ne_Grasset_d%27Orcet

p.s.
check out David Ovason's impressive description of 19 different ways to work out texts rotten/written in la Langue d'Oiseaux.

We've got it. Right here in Vienna! Live in these rooms ...
http://www.khm.at/de/kunsthistorisches-museum/sammlungen/gemaeldegalerie/
... and next to all them Teniers, van Eycks and Rubens:
http://www.khm.at/de/kunsthistorisches-museum/sammlungen/gemaeldegalerie/flaemische-malerei-17-jahrhundert/

http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000829.php

So he drank absinthe with Murger, Gautier, and de Musset ... members of the Petit-Cenacle. Surprise, surprise.

That book on the Ars Punica was not written by Swift but by his friend.

Not to forget Nerval ... der "Hans-Dampf-In-Allen-Gassen".

Yeah. We've been through that before.

Ars Punica was by Thomas Sheridan, his godson.

(The Right Rev.) Jonathan Swift wrote the book that seems to maybe have more directly inspired Boudet than anything else ... A DIscourse to Prove the Antiquity of the English Tongue.

Author Gérard de Nerval (1808 – 55) says of the Queen of the South: “... such as I saw her in my dreams ... crowned with stars, in a turban sparkling with the colours of the rainbow ... her face is olive-tinted ... one foot is on a bridge, the other on a wheel ... one hand rests on the highest rock of the mountains in the Yemen, the other stretched out to the heavens holds ... the flower of fire ... the celestial serpent opens its maw to seize it ... the Sign of the Ram appears twice in the zodiac, which reflects the face of the Queen as in a mirror, a face which takes on the features of St Rosalie ... she appears, crowned with stars, ready to save the world ... on the peak of the highest mountain of the Yemen a wonderful bird is singing in a cage ... it is the talisman of the new ages ... Leviathan with black wings flies heavily around ... beyond the sea there rises another peak on which is written this name: Mérovée.”

He used to take his pet lobster for a walk.

Another one of my favorites along the way is Erik Satie. He had a collection of 100 umbrellas, most of which he never used.

People don't get it. This is why I'm into this stuff. Mostly. These people intrigue me.

Life is absurd. I just like the people who aren't afraid to admit it.

I like the thought of the walking the pet Lobster. That is so kool.

Feel free to wave your crazy flag.

He took it for walks in the Palais Royal gardens in Paris on the end of a blue silk ribbon. He regarded them lobsters as "peaceful, serious creatures, who know the secrets of the sea, and don't bark".
>>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_de_Nerval

Cript-Kabbale, in his beautiful and intelligent site ABC du Tarot de Marseille, shows how the language of the birds, initially rediscovered by Grasset d'Orcet and popularized through the works of Fulcanelli, was widely used in the Marseille cards (lame, card, in phonetic cabala yields l’âme, soul). This cabala consists in using the similar sound of different words to encrypt esoteric messages. This phonetic cabala was a widespread phenomenon both in Western esotericism and in Middle-Eastern Islamic esotericism.

Cript-Kabbale accomplished a brilliant cabalistic analysis of the traditional French song Mon ami Pierrot. In this case, Pierrot yields Pie erre haut or 'The Magpie wanders in the High'... I wonder about the relation between this folk song with the Sufi text of Ferid ud-Din Attar, The Language (or Conference) of the birds, written in Persian... The date of its composition is near the date of the presumed appearance of the Tarot cards and also of the composition of this French song; geographically these events are not so distant, and the Persian text is also about the Magpie (in French, Pie) who is the central character of the story and who is also very important in the language of the birds system (or phonetic cabala). The relation or even the profound filiation between Medieval European Hermeticism and Muslim esotericism (and of course Muslim alchemy) is flagrant.

http://www.ojardimhermetico.com/eng/02taro1.html

Thanx for the link. I see that Jodorowski is still busy doing psychomagic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Mountain_%281973_film%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky

abra ... cad ... abra ...

Let us get Sirius once more. More and more I've been thinking about whether it is wrong to dismiss Boudet's LVLC as a crank work. The guy did serious work in linguistics and philology. He was a serious scholar. Although most have dismissed LVLC as crankery, it doesn't seem to fit within his other scholarship, which often was sound. Now, I have to say, the hypothesis that English was the first primordial language seems ridiculous. Even though it'd be nice to be true. But if so, it makes the Demiurge even more demented, since English is one of the poorer languages when it comes to orthography and pronunciation, making it one of the hardest to learn. At least other languages spell words the way they say them.

I have a feeling Boudet was hunting for a language at the root of all others. It looks like he was influenced by Fabre d'Olivet and Grasset d'Orcet. (Maybe the theme of the book was inspired by Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan.) So was Benjamin Lee Whorf! Henry Lincoln said he was trying to really claim mathematics was the ur-language; others that the langue d'oiseaux or green language was the original. Well, maybe. But, more and more I've been wondering: could he be right? Was their once an original single human language? It's not only cranks and mystics that have ever considered this possibility. The Tower of Babel story in the Bible, like so many others, is a fable. But is it an allegory?

It looks like these ideas were starting to be kicked around in Boudet's time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogenesis_(linguistics)

In linguistics, monogenesis refers to the thesis that all spoken human languages are descended from a single ancestral language spoken many thousands of years ago in the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age.

The first serious scientific attempt to establish the reality of monogenesis was that of Alfredo Trombetti, an accomplished Italian linguist, in his book L'unità d'origine del linguaggio, published in 1905 (cf. Ruhlen 1994:263). Trombetti estimated that the common ancestor of existing languages had been spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago (1922:315).

The best-known supporter of monogenesis in America in the mid-20th century was Morris Swadesh (cf. Ruhlen 1994:215). He pioneered two important methods for investigating deep relationships between languages, lexicostatistics and glottochronology.

In the second half of the 20th century, Joseph Greenberg produced a series of large-scale classifications of the world's languages. These were and are controversial but widely discussed. Although Greenberg did not produce an explicit argument for monogenesis, all of his classification work was geared toward this end. As he stated (1987:337): "The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family."

Three well-known living advocates of monogenesis are Merritt Ruhlen, John Bengtson, and Harold Fleming.

[snip]

However, in the opinion of many scientists in other fields, such as Richard Klein in paleoanthropology (see glottogony), the ability to produce complex speech only developed some 50,000 years ago (with the appearance of modern man or Cro-Magnon man). Thus, if all recent human populations on Earth (including, for example, Australians, appearing 40,000 - 50,000 years before the present) stem from a single out-of-Africa migration, linguistic monogenesis becomes a conceivable hypothesis.

[snip]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Human_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages

Most people have usually parsed Boudet's works for clues to something else. But what if this were the exact real problem he was working on? We know d'Orcet and d'Olivet were looking for the same thing.

Seeker1:

What if had in the first place.
What if it was the language of the angels, language of the birds, la verte langue , langue d'oiseaux.
What if so simple it was elegant.

Look back at Jewish history what is the language that is most revered and frankly, most hidden.

And don't tell me I'm being obscure I've given you a clue.
If fact I pointed the way for Louvian if she researched back to its root she would have found it.

Judaism teaches that Hebrew was the primordial language, the language of Adam and Eve in the Garden, the language of the angels...

The hidden part is the Kabbalah, gematria, and the secret ways of interpreting it ...

Language, the Vehicle of Creation and the Substance of the World

http://www.newkabbalah.com/FormProp.htm

The Lurianic Kabbalah is not on its face primarily a linguistic theory of creation. However, the Jewish tradition in general, and the Kabbalistic tradition in particular, clearly understood divine creativity in linguistic terms, and both the early and later commentators on Luria’s system provided linguistic interpretations of the Lurianic symbols. In this and the following sections I explore the role of language in the Kabbalah in general, as well as the linguistic interpretations of the Lurianic symbols that were provided by Luria’s followers and the Hasidim. These interpretations provide the basis for my view that the Lurianic system is a model of language.

For many Kabbalists, language was thought to be both the vehicle of creation and the substance of the world. Already in the earliest proto-Kabbalistic work Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Formation) we find a theory of creation in which the universe is said to have been created via the 22 consonant/letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These letters and the ten Sefirot, which in Sefer Yetzirah constitute a parallel, numerical metaphor for creation, together constitute “the thirty wondrous paths of creation.”[3] For Sefer Yetzirah it is the Otiyot Yesod, the foundational letters, through which God “formed substance out of chaos and made nonexistence into existence.”[4]

The idea that language as the vehicle of creation is present in what is generally regarded to be the earliest Kabbalistic text, Sefer ha-Bahir,[5] and in an anonymous early Kabbalistic text, “Source of Wisdom,” where we find the theory that the world was created through an inscription of divine speech in the Primordial Ether (Avir Kadmon). The locus classicus of the Kabbalah, the Zohar asserts that it is “the supernal letters that brought into being all the works of the lower world, literally after their own pattern.”[6]

The Kabbalists were, of course, simply reflecting biblical and talmudic notions of the world’s origins in divine speech. The rabbis had interpreted the early chapters of Genesis to mean that the world was created via ten divine utterances, and the view ultimately developed that the language of the Torah sustains creation as well. The Talmud (Eruvin, 13a) records the advice of Rabbi Ishmael to a scribe: “be careful in your work for it is the work of God, if you omit a single letter, or write a letter too many you will destroy the whole world.”

Moses Cordovero, who was the leading Safedian Kabbalist prior to Isaac Luria held that the language of the Torah we actually read (and the language that thereby ultimately comprises the world) is the result of transformations in a hidden, primordial language, which is the ultimate “deep structure” of our world, and which transforms itself in each new age. Cordovero held a theory of linguistic/ontological parallelism in which language and the world reciprocally determine one another.

Israel Sarug, an early exponent of the Lurianic Kabbalah, held that the torah, as it was originally conceived in the highest world of Atziluth, is comprised of all possible combinations of the 22 consonants of the Hebrew language. This idea is suggestive of both an infinite number of “possible worlds,” and, as we shall see below, a type of infinity, which can be denoted as “linguistic space,” that is indeed larger than any infinity of the actual or even the possible (i.e. “logical space”).”[7] According to Sarug, the descent of the letters through the various lower worlds caused them to take on distinct combinations that yielded holy and angelic names, and finally the Torah itself, which is a blueprint for all of creation. Each world, on Sarug’s view, is constructed out of combinations of the primordial letters.[8]

The Hasidim further radicalized the idea of linguistic creation. Schneur Zalman of Lyadi, the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, commenting on the words of the Baal Shem Tov wrote: “For if the letters (which comprise divine speech) were to depart [even] for an instant, God forbid, and return to their source, all the heavens would become naught and absolute nothingness, and it would be as though they had never existed at all, exactly as before the utterance, “Let there be a firmament.”[9] Further, Schneur Zalman held, in accord with a suggestion in Sefer Yetzirah, that the entire cosmos was created as a result of the substitution, transposition and rearrangement of the “letters” which comprised the ten biblical sayings with which God is described in Genesis as creating the world.

Scholem has pointed out that various Kabbalists and Hasidim held that human speech creates new powers and lights in the world.[10] On this view, humanity, in its continual combination and recombination of letters (or phonemes and morphemes), is continues the creative process initiated by God.

[snip]

And what are they? How was it done?



If it is the primordial language than what do you think it looks like?



How does a primordial language capture the essence of the world and be a vehicle of creation?

Again what do think it would look like?

Rain:

If you answer this question in the affirmative it gives you an alternative to understanding how Abbe Boudet and Grasset d'Orcet may have had a grasp on the concept of an original and divine language.




So that means we know what it looks like now but what would it have looked like in the beginning. What would have been the blueprint for all of creation/language????

Let me try and explain this way. Your cup is full. You have the knowledge there in front of you which means you have preconceived notions of what an initial language would look like. You have to somehow empty some of your cup and allow new ideas, one's you haven't considered to replace your old idealogy.
Unfortunately your were born thousands of years away from that point in time. If it was a tree of human developement you'd be a little leaf up on a branch looking down, your view obsured by everyone else's knowledge, you can't see the seed from which sprouted the root and then the trunk then the branches than the leaves. Your task is now to look down and try and see that seed that was planted thousands of years ago.
You have to strip away thousands of years of knowledge and evolution bit by bit, and any derivaitions to find the initial Blueprints to find what you are looking for.
Only then can reconstruct over time how languages have evolved.
If it was an explosion you would be looking for ground zero. The Alpha point of the creative explosion.
So my point is start from the beginning.
Strip the tree until you can see nothing but what started this.
It's simple not complex.
Your first 3 sentences captured it's true essence and then you jumped far ahead to it's derivations and complexity.



P.S. Until you get this you will not understand what knowledge Boudet and Grasset had.

PP.S. Don't write a dissertation for me. I have thousands of books. Yes, I'm counting my mills and boon, cookbooks and children's books but nonetheless I have enough.
This is for you.
I want you to see, what you need to see, in order to understand what you are looking at.