What happened eight hundred years ago? Bogomils head towards the West, Teutonic Knights towards the north, the crusading hosts march to the East, and amber trickles gently towards the South. A veritable network of arteries, spiritual and material… Near Hungary's southern border, on the gentle slopes of the Mecsek, there nestles a small village, Mánfa. Its church, from the age of the first Hungarian royal dynasty, the House of Árpád, was built in the twelfth century. Or rather only its beginnings, the small church building, originally almost perfectly square in plan, with a free-standing bell tower. But the villagers, it seems, outgrew the church and set about enlarging it: they extended the walls both sideways and lengthways, so that the original apse now lies to the right of the building's long axis, and the tower on the western side was incorporated into the building. A surprising likeness: Chartres Cathedral was built in much the same way. The earlier building burned down, only its towers survived, and to these the new nave was later joined. The method of building matches, and so does the age – the enlargement of the Mánfa church is Gothic, just like the splendid cathedral of Chartres…
In time the village moved away, and the old church was abandoned and overgrown by the forest. When it was rediscovered, hardly any ornament remained, a carving here and there on the jambs of the doorway, the tiny columns of the tower, the stone frames of the windows. The remains of the nearby cemetery, long since cleared, were laid in a small ossuary behind the building. Yet it is held that a remarkable international trade route ran right here, at the edge of the village – perhaps in front of the church. Yes, the Amber Road…
Mánfa and Chartres – a spiritual bond through religion, churches built by the same method, the same orientation and the same age, which is to say that the space-time continuum is mapped identically. This invisible axis joining East and West, detected by no one, is crossed by the north–south Amber Road – what kind of centre might the point of intersection mark? This alone would be more than enough for one to meditate on these facts for a lifetime. But there is one more thread. Today the wall of the Mánfa church is covered with plaster of a single colour, and only on the western face of the tower can a larger opened patch be seen, which looks as if it were the preparation for a fresco, or rather an undercoat half knocked away, half uncovered. And although nothing can be made out on the surface today, archaeologists suppose that an image of Saint Christopher once adorned the church. Just as a statue of Christopher adorned the square before Notre-Dame in Paris, and in so many other sacred buildings Christopher bearing Christ appears in a fresco or a relief. In the fresco of Toledo Cathedral, Saint Christopher looks a veritable giant. But the Greek Christophoros, Christ-bearer, can also be read another way: chryso-phoros means gold-bearer! Besides the architectural, economic and cultural, or religious parallels, here is an occult sign as well, in East and West alike. Perhaps al-chimia, too, was once a common symbolic language?
… cabalistic phonetics, however, reveals another meaning, according to the Hermetic teaching. Christophe is used in place of the word Chrysophe – bearing gold (Gk. Chrysophoros). If we speak of Christopher in this sense, the vast significance of the symbol at once becomes clearer. The symbol of the solar sulphur (Jesus), or of the nascent gold, as it rises from the waves of Mercurius, and then, by its own power drawn from this Mercurius, attains the degree of the powers that possess the Elixir. Aristotle says that Mercurius is symbolised by the colour grey or violet, which is explanation enough for why the statues of Saint Christopher were given a coating of that colour. (Fulcanelli: The Mystery of the Cathedrals, Arcticus, 2001.)
The spirit of inquiry rightly entails forming an opinion after thorough study, and on one's own responsibility. What happened eight hundred years ago… let each decide for himself.