https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LfCKVnQMe8g
So hello everybody, I am here with Gauthier Pierre-Ozac. Gauthier is a lover of symbolism, you know, very fascinating person in himself and he went on a very, a really exciting journey to dive into and discover the works of Louis Charbonneau Lassé. Many people don’t, you might not know about him, he was an early 20th century symbolist, very important influential but because of the war and because of many things that were happening around him, some of his work got lost and some of it got forgotten. There is an English version of his main work that we know about which is the Bestiary of Christ, a highly edited version. His French version is quite longer and more, is fuller and Gauthier is now involved in a new publication called The Vulnerary of Christ in which this is Charbonneau’s work on the symbolism of the five wounds of Christ and just how universal they are and how extended that language kind of becomes in Christianity. So it’s a very, it’s a very fascinating book to be published right now, a very important one and so I’m really looking forward to diving into his discovery of Charbonneau and also the work itself. This is Jonathan Pagel, welcome to the Symbolic World. And so Gauthier, maybe you can start off very simply and tell us how you became interested in the work of Charbonneau-Lassé. Yes, thanks for inviting me to your podcast. I’ve been very interested in symbolism and Christian symbolism in particular since I was very young. I was introduced to this through the fact that I lived in France, I lived in a little tiny village with a church that was over a thousand years old and there were symbols engraved on the outside of the church and of course it started my curiosity and I kept, you know, there’s a lot of people who were along the way who advised me to read which book and that book and over the years I was becoming more interested in the bigger aspect of symbolism. It’s not just limited to Christianity, it’s just the way I’m looking at it, it is a language based on intuition. You use symbolism when you cannot express with words some concepts that are just divine or, and the best example and now I’m going to bring that back later is the concept of infinity. Our brain cannot comprehend infinity, we can get close to it, we can use with words, we can try to explain but we cannot define it. I think symbolism allows you to go a step above with communication of this concept and I’m sure you understand these patterns surrounding us that cannot be explained but we can feel them intuitively so that was my approach. I also have kind of a specialty, my brain sees in colors, I see letters in colors, I see depth when I listen to music so I realized after a while it’s I think it’s a known condition that I have already in my brain a wire that bypasses language and so that’s why I really appreciate symbolism. So in the process I was reading René Guénon, she’s a perennialist in France and found out that he was involved with a Christian publication in the early mid-1920s called Regnabit. Regnabit was a periodical, a motley, where it was dedicated to the sacred heart of Jesus. Everything about it from doctrines, symbols, arts, philosophy, poetry, anything and within this periodical was a gentleman named Louis Charbonneau-Lassie that started engraving for the periodical. He was doing the the wooden engravings and they would print these symbols or these representations. That’s how he started participating in 1921, I believe it was. After a while he started writing articles about some of his findings. So what’s very interesting is that Louis Charbonneau-Lassie was born in 1871, so he’s a 19th century kind of old school gentleman. He joined early, I think he was 11 years old when he joined a Christian school. He stayed there constantly and wanted to become a priest and he just became a teacher in that school, started trying to become a priest. In 1903 a law in France just separated a church from the state officially and the congregation he was part of simply disappeared. So he ended up being back into the secular life if you want. At that time, and it is so interesting how little details can change some people’s lives, one of his teachers at the congregation he was part of was also an archaeologist. Or maybe early at that time they were kind of digging around and finding stuff they didn’t expect. They would dig under old stones, standing stones and would find skeletons and a lot of old artifacts and he became very interested in this. I have some old writing of his where in the early 1900s he was actually exploring underground caves where people during the past wars, religious wars and all that, they were hiding and they would leave artifacts behind. So it’s an interesting aspect because he became an archaeologist, which is a scientist, while being truly a Christian, true Christian and by the way a Catholic, but very interested in all sorts of symbolism. So he found on his own all these artifacts, he started questioning why he was finding. There was really a lot of representation of Christ through animals, through all sorts of symbols and that’s what the mystery of Christ is. It’s really interesting. So fast forward in the 1920s, he became part of that periodical regnabit and he started using his finding, archaeological findings, to write about the symbolism of Christian artifacts. So he would talk about the lion, he would talk about the bull and he would also explore, and that’s the interesting part for the villainary, all the symbolism of the heart of Jesus and his biggest mystery for him is how come I’m finding artifacts that are that are hundreds of years, they were showing the heart of Jesus even though the doctrine of the sacred heart only appeared in the 17th century. So that’s where his own quest started there and it took us, and we’ll talk about it if you want, very deep in this book. Yeah and so he was working in collaboration even until I guess the end of, I don’t know who passed away first, but until the end of their lives he worked in collaboration with Guineau in this kind of rediscovery of symbolism and this is what kind of led to the bestiary. And so he really is a, I would say one of the key figures in the sense that there was a lot of symbolism thinking happening obviously at the end of the 19th and early 20th century, but a lot of it was in the stranger world, the world of the kind of esoteric world and the world of of philosophy and all of these kinds of worlds, but but Chabonolasse really wanted to frame his understanding of symbolism within his Catholicism and Christianity. Yeah, yeah I call that he was an orthodox Catholic, he was very very careful not to to steer into occultism, esoterism and all that. However him and Guineau became really good friends. So as I mentioned through different people who knew each other they were introduced and Chabonolasse and Guineau met, Guineau went to his house in the Louden and saw all his artifacts and in fact what you see through their correspondence until the from 1924 to 1946 when Chabonolasse died before Guineau, Guineau was helping Chabonolasse by providing findings of his about Christian symbolism. He would give him everything, he would even support the publication of the bestiary of Christ even though Guineau at that time was a Muslim, he would give everything to Chabonolasse because he thought there was an extraordinary project. In fact he was asking Chabonolasse for his opinion on Christian symbolism and Chabonolasse would ask Guineau for other traditions interpretation because one symbol can be interpreted many ways depending on the context. So it was an interesting collaboration of respects however they would keep their ground separate. Yeah because Chabonolasse even though you know talking about Guineau even though he is clearly Catholic and orthodox he’s also not afraid to point to the places where these similar structures appear in other cultures. He’s not also kind of a correct not close-minded and focused only on his thing but really sees through the Christian lens even some symbolism coming from ancient pagan cultures or from other cultures as well. Yeah and I think that came from his archaeology background but also from Guineau. I have actually we’ll talk about this later but I have you know all these archives that Chabonolasse left behind and there is hundreds of notes of when he met with Guineau and they talked about this subject or another it was fascinating. This is the Indiana Jones now part of the story so tell us what happened to his work and also your part in rediscovering it. Yeah so you asked me earlier and I never answered how I find out about Chabonolasse. So I was reading Guineau and I was talking to some friends of mine who say hey you should buy the bestiary of Christ so that was mid-90s and so I did purchase the bestiary of Christ and found it fascinating. I read it from beginning to end even though it looks like kind of a dictionary almost every animal is listed with a symbol and based on but I read it as a whole and I came out of this book with a very strange feeling and I don’t know how the English version is it’s been shortened. Yeah that’s a product yeah there’s a project of doing a new version I’ll be involved as well we’re going to translate the whole thing but after I finished reading the book I was I had a kind of an experience of suddenly I was looking outside and I love being in the woods and all that then everything certainly I realized everything could symbolize Christ the grant not just the man but the the god of nature yeah with the nature basically that’s right so we started with the animals and it just blew my mind and I wanted to know more so that’s when I started doing some of my own research I had some access to Guineau’s letters that an Italian scholar Piero Lughi Soccatelli had published a few books so I contacted this gentleman and we became friends and and that’s how I learned through him and that Charbonneau had planned to write other books the bestiary was one of several he was going to write another book about the symbolism of the plants and vegetables that represent Christ in any way possible and then third book about minerals but that’s not it what I found out through the archives he was going to write books about all the items there were anything liturgic objects planets and stars it was anything that could exist which represent Christ and that’s kind of an interesting approach to instead of apophatism when you cannot express God without talking negatively about him he took another approach with the infinity of God is expressed to the infinity of all the manifestation living on earth and the universe I thought it was fascinating I’ve never seen that before and that’s that’s been my passion so I was wondering and that’s where it was interesting what happened to those archives so I was actually working at that time it was early 2010 with the Guineau family I was gathering all the writing of Guineau and all his letters because I was I was just curious and in the process they shared with me some letters they had of Charbonneau l’Assai that were kept in Cairo in Egypt where Guineau finished his life and they shared those letters with me so I could I had them in my hand and I was reading the letters and I realized there was that book the Vulnerable of Christ that he finished just before his death he was very old he was in late 70s he was complaining to Guineau that his eyes didn’t work very well the publishing company had lost a lot of his engravings he had to redo 60 or 70 of those he was it was fascinating and he was telling the whole table of content of the book and it was very interesting because what I found out is that that book had been stolen after his death we don’t know the condition we don’t know anything but somebody came to the people who owned all the archives of Charbonneau and he borrowed the manuscript saying he was going to publish it and he was never found again. So what I did I tracked those archives I contacted the the family so they shared a lot of things with me but they didn’t have those archives and this brings us to a very mysterious and kind of Indian-Nigerian story is that I don’t know if you know that but there is somebody who helped Charbonneau with the symbolism of the middle-age medieval symbolism of the sacred heart and all the symbols in the bestiary. One of Charbonneau’s mentors he was a a priest nearby named Théophile Barbeau. I may have a picture of him I’ll share that with you for the audience and this gentleman was very old Charbonneau was helping him just like he was very helping him with his day-to-day kind of he couldn’t write so he would write for him he was very old and that gentleman Théophile Barbeau shared with Charbonneau that he was part of an organization of Christians called Etwa l’Internel and that was kind of an organization of a few people I’m not going to say a secret organization because that’s really not fair but kind of an organization of a few people who were carrying archives from the middle-age it was very strange and they shared that information with Charbonneau so he could write about it because the content was in line with what Charbonneau was studying the symbolism of animals the symbolism of the sacred hearts so they gave him these old men gave him their archives to study and they also had carried through the middle-age some kind of a knighthood ritual it was called the Chevalier du Paraclet the knights of the holy spirit if you want just some kind of a group of people like that would protect that knowledge and they made Charbonneau he transmitted to Charbonneau the basically that the right to make new knights that’s what he was included he was brought into this yes yes so after his death he left all his archives to the few of those knights that still lived at the time and they were by the way friends of Renegade so it was a small group their goal and I found out in the letter was to use the archives to finish the work of Charbonneau they’re going to finish the book about the plants the book about the minerals and but they didn’t the group died everybody it didn’t survive it just just in physical way yeah that’s what I heard so those archives were still in the position of the last of those knights I think he’s a friend of the last of the knights after he died in 1999 sold those archives to publishers in Italy it’s just strange crazy interestingly the owner of those archives was the one published the bestiary of christ in in the 80s or 70s and the fresh version there was a facsimile his name was Laszlo Topps he was the director of the arcade editions and he’s the one I’ve met and first he showed them to me so I could consult and he wanted he was supporting me he wanted me to help reconstitute the books because he was 80 years old when I met him he passed he passed away a few weeks ago and in the end I negotiated hey can I can I own them can I buy them from you so we agreed on the price but I could not afford that price first my wife didn’t want me to spend money on that garbage and I respected that so what I did is I say well what if I did a crowdfunding project okay where I ask all the traditionalists around the world to uh hold on my dog wants to come join us to to see if they wanted to help and it and we did that 2016 I started the crowd crowdfunding project and in two weeks I had the money two weeks so I bought the archives it was sent to me and now I have uh I mean hundreds of folders and I’m going to share that with you it’s really let me show you a little bit so for example this one is about the Byzantium letymasy yeah the intimacy yeah intimacy so it has these notes so I’m sorry to show you so it’s just so it’s made of so it’s interesting because we’re talking about the 1930s 1940s so this is shipping paper it was recycling paper that was used uh you know originally that symbol was for the mountain okay but the content became um yeah so we have some yeah yeah and it’s at the back of letters so you can see uh I may have some run again on there’s a hundred of them then he he talks about the content and so it’s been plenty of notes so it’s all organized by symbol like organized by a symbol wow and then there is yeah like he would recycle some some of his own writings and um there’s some beautiful things so it’s for an artist and and for an artist it is an extraordinary mine of information and inspiration so what I decided to do and that’s important you may not know that in exchange for the for getting the funds my goal is to share that with everybody so for the past three years I have scanned every single of those archives and they are now available there’s about 40 000 notes for everyone I have a website called I’ll give you the link archive charbonolasse.org yeah and you can have access to everything so that’s my role is to share that’s really what it is it’s amazing so but there’s a lot of so you’ve been able to scan the entire archives and yeah it took me years his engravings all the drawings are his yes all of them and I even have some uh some something I’m gonna show you so it’s beautiful like he did some engravings of the wow the holy yeah yeah nice yeah this is the this is called the rosa mystica 1923 yeah some of those these are more stylized very beautiful yes they are they are and then he has it’s funny he was keeping track of all his engravings he’s done thousands in sheets that he would just print them so he would remember what he had uh-huh right right right yeah this is one of the underground he was exploring when he was uh he’s getting 19 yeah his caves so there’s some of that there’s some uh all kind of uh all kind of stuff it’s just incredible it’s just incredible and there’s a museum in france charbonolasse it’s in luda they have inherited all but these archives went to the knights of the paraclet everything he found archaeologically wise is at a museum in luda so i contacted them and we became really close they gave me access to they kept they still have the engravings the pieces of wood wow that he engraved with a knife he was done with a knife and um it’s it’s uh it’s fascinating so now the books of the vulnerability were you able to recover the manuscript or did you reconstruct it good question i’m still not so so that’s going back to the indiana jones so when i when i saw in the letters he sent again on the table of content and i realized i had a lot of because he even for the bestiary a lot of the chapters were published separately in the periodical over 10 years he had he modified them a little later but he done the same with the the content of villainry okay and and so i was i started collecting everything he published because i found some stuff from the 1910s some 1936 it was all over but because i had the table of content i knew what to look for so i had to reconstitute some of it and i had to and i was able to reuse some of what he published but my original goal was i’m going to publish a reconstituted villainry it doesn’t matter if it’s accurate i want the person who stole it to come out and say hey this is not right i have the manuscript it never happened never happened no never happened i don’t know where it is huh well it’s a strange world too it’s a it’s a it’s a world of secrets so sometimes there are people involved in these circles that uh that find power and secrecy and so i agree i agree i agree and one of those is yeah it’s being part of a group you i do not know what happened with that manuscript obviously the person who took it is probably not alive anymore this was another generation uh but i i have hints i mean i have a name um the goal is to my quest is not over that’s astounding that’s really amazing uh wow this is it’s such a it’s such a great story also because you know i also had my you know my interest in chabonot uh of course early on when i became interested in symbolism you know because he was far more christian and far more and i was that that was the direction that i was taking and so obviously the bestiary was an important part of my kind of my formation and and even just the possibility of thinking about medieval symbolism and and uh i mean western western medieval imagery is often more emblematic and so it’s it’s even more it’s more easily interpreted in the way that you know would interpret symbolism almost in a geometric way and so i can really see i could really see how chabonot and him would would come together quite quite well in terms of uh bringing out christian symbolism so this so it’s wonderful to see these books coming out and and also there are future projects that you’re putting together i’m working on reconstituting the the lapidary of christ lapidary from uh stones uh and i’ve started uh so it’s it’s i am amazed at what he gathered i’m putting this together in french now of course it will be translated in english after that because french is my original language it’s also the all these notes are in french but um right now just studying just the basic rock um for example the rock symbolizes something that is indestructible right i even go even further think about the diamond yeah diamond stone i’m writing an article about this i’ll love to share it with you when it’s published the diamond um i don’t know if you knew that but nobody knew how to cut a diamond until the 15th century when uh with technologies people were able to use diamonds to cut diamonds but back in the early ages a diamond was found in the rough and it was indestructible they could not break it the hammer would bounce out of it um and and you couldn’t do anything and it’s when it comes naturally it has the form of an octagon yeah kind of a diamond shape you know diamond that’s why but when you look at the symbolism uh and i just finished studying this charbonneau identified that because the diamond stone is indestructible it symbolizes the the indivisibility god cannot be divided in fact i would say even further the god is without dimensions therefore you cannot cut it you cannot divide it you cannot measure it but that’s what the diamond was symbolizing and um and and what’s interesting is that the diamond can only be cut by itself and there were some old symbolism where the diamond was associated to jesus christ because the symbol you know when he was on the cross he let that happen to him so when you look at the uh old testament when moses uh uses staff to hit a rock and water comes out of it to to yeah help the the jews this is actually a prefiguration of christ on the cross uh where he he died to to redeem the world well what’s interesting is you can see that a lot with the symbolism of the rock in the old testament uh moses goes to the top of a mountain to go see god uh in the old legends the diamond could only be found in an eastern mountain at the very top okay you could make sense yeah in terms of the symbolism makes sense it’s like it’s a heavenly stone almost it’s right and and the last thing is you know uh there’s that story where uh uh the the builders they reject that stone that looks like nothing and that becomes the stone that you use the capstone to finish a church or a vault or whatever so the capstone symbol end up symbolizing christ because he was rejected by anyone but he was the most precious stone of all where everything holds because of him so we found old manuscript medieval manuscripts where the shape of a diamond was put at the top of a vault the same way amazing yeah that’s just one yeah it’s an amazing joining of all the symbolism together because i remember that one one of the insights that i got from guinot which is that the idea of the rejecting stone becomes the corner stone that’s how we understand it but you know really brought about the idea that no it’s the it’s the capstone or the key of the arch you know it’s the idea of this last stone that you put in which holds it together and i thought that’s it and since then like there’s no i could never interpret it differently it just it makes so much sense but the idea of having this diamond you know this image of the diamond at the top in in the in the vault is uh is wonderful in terms of indivisibility and this heavenly stone that comes down that’s great stuff yeah i’ll send that to you that way you can show your audience i definitely definitely will so that’s a very exciting project so you’ve got several exciting projects to uh to uh to to still work on yeah it’s probably a lifetime and i probably won’t finish it and i’ll pass it on to somebody else and that’s seems like that’s what happened to me there was a generation who tried they started i have a lot of notes and all that from others pass it on to me i was able to publish the preliminary and i’ll try to continue and pass it on to others yeah it’s wonderful and and you haven’t had any you haven’t had much resistance which is great like the the or maybe you have you didn’t just didn’t tell us um well i’m not very public you know i don’t i mean i want to talk to christians in general that friends of mine who don’t understand symbolism they think it’s paganism they think it’s yeah all kind of stuff but yeah so i don’t talk about this only with people who can understand now in private i have i’m working right now with a small group in argentina who are christians they love symbolism and they are translating the vulnerary right now so i’m helping them i’m sharing those archives with them and we’re going to publish that one probably at the end of the year spanish version of the vulnerary that’s wonderful yeah i i found that in in south america there’s some interesting in brazil as well there’s a interesting resurgence of symbolic thinking which is which is definitely worth in being invested in yeah that’s really amazing um so and so you also i may be my last question because you mentioned that you were talking you were working with the guinot family as well in terms of of collating some of the letters is that a project you’re still involved with so i did it for them um no i’m not involved anymore there was a few years ago uh they had a kind of a they called a foundation where they would uh uh attempt to get basically they wanted to publish all the work of guinot uh revised but they this project has stopped uh guinot’s work is going to be in the public domain next year january 2022 and i think at that time it’s going to be completely free for all basically everybody’s going to publish whatever they want unfortunately but i i had access to all those letters of course there’s a lot of confidentiality you know it’s it’s for them yeah but i i yeah i had access to a lot of letters and by the way i have a website again uh where i actually put all the guinot’s work in french including the correspondence all the letters for all to access and this website has really missed 10 years old now it has thousands of visitors every day and i believe it helps bring guinot’s work to the masses if you want in some ways uh but um really my i mean i live in the united states i’ve been here for 20 years my goal was to try to bring uh some of guinot but mostly charbonneau lassie’s work to the anglo-saxon or the english-speaking world and that’s i was very impressed when uh i mean angelico quest i don’t know if you knew that when i tried to get my crowdfunding going on i sent a few emails in the united states a few people i knew one person who helped me was james cutzinger have you heard of james yeah i had friends i was friends with james cutzinger i made i made some even some pieces for the end of his life oh wow yeah yeah so he helped me very early on uh early in the 2000s when i was early i didn’t even know about charbonneau and all that but i was kind of guided towards the symbolism of the hearts yeah which is the center which is everything he’s one of those who helped me and when i contacted him to say hey i’m doing a crowdfunding crowdfunding he sent it to a few other people there’s very few in the united states in north america you probably know them all but one of them was jean champoux jean champoux um who um uh could not what he offered instead of the crowdfunding to give me money he said what if i translate the vulnerary in english for you and that’s what he did it took him years and and then he contacted angelico press we worked together we did another crowdfunding so we could pay for this but it went really well so it is definitely a walk of passion we don’t do that for the money nobody buys this book you know it will never it won’t be a best seller but it no no no it will have uh it will have an impact i think so everybody you need to you need to get it i’m still working through it it’s a it’s a massive book it’s heavily documented it has it has hundreds i think like at least a hundred images of all the different engraving that charbonneau l’assez uh has done so it’s really a wonderful book and it’s really like i said charbonneau l’assez really in terms of my work uh precursor someone who laid the foundation for symbolic thinking in the christian world and so we’re we’re very grateful for him and gotye very grateful for the work you’re doing and looking forward to seeing it uh continue to flower so thanks yeah no problem and uh i will send you the link to the archives and and um never hesitate if you want me to look for something in the archives i’ll send them to you i was the other day you walked on that san christopher with a dog head i’m kidding man yeah and i found that in these archives as well so i thought it was cool i remember seeing that image in the early bestiary edition of like the french edition that was actually probably the first time i ever saw that image was in charbonneau’s early uh like the french edition the facsimile one that was like just it was it was massive that book yeah it was that’s awesome yeah so it’s great and yeah for now like i think that uh yeah it’s an opening for people to look into medieval symbolism and like i said for everybody who’s interested in symbolism you know he was our he’s our ancestor in the in a spiritual way so so look into the vulgarary and the bestiary looking forward to the full publication of the book and all the future projects so thanks a lot no you’re welcome thanks for having me