Nutation of the Basye Vortex

"SOLSTITIUM AESTIVUM
ANNI MDCCXLV
PRO NUTATIONE AXIOS TERREN
OBLIQUITATE ECLIPTICAE"
- inscribed in the south transept of the church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris 

"There were three who walked with the Lord at all times: Mary his mother, her sister, and Magdalen, the one who is called his companion." 

- The Gospel of Phillip, from the Nag Hammadi library.

Recently famous because of its prominent role in the madly popular novel, The DaVinci Code, The Église de Saint-Sulpice is a massive Baroque church in the center of the Left Bank (the "6th Arrondissement") of Paris. It is factual that Saint-Sulpice was built over the foundations of an older church, dating to the 13th C.; what is less certain is whether, as is alleged, beneath the 13th C. structure there was originally an ancient temple of the goddess Isis. The fact that the city of Paris may have been named after Isis ("par-Isis" -- no doubt a controversial notion: see more on this in the section on the Black Madonna), makes of this church-upon-church-upon-temple edifice even more of a unique historical enigma. Also it would not be so strange to build a church on top of a pagan temple, in effect claiming the place and "repurposing" it: after all statues of Isis holding Horus were adopted by Christians to become Mary holding the Christ child... 

Lost in the shuffle  of all this speculation is the fact that Saint-Sulpice is also a stone's throw from another legendary church, that of St-Germain des Prés, the oldest abbey in Paris, the repository of the tunic of St. Vincent -- and today, a busier location than Saint-Sulpice. The Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots and the Brasserie Lipp - the most famous literary and cafes in town - are basically across the street or just a few steps from the entrance of the church of St Germain. 

These establishments have been frequented by celebrities, artists and writers, from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Lauren Bacall, Johnny Depp and Kate Moss. The Deux Magots is the best place in Paris to enjoy a plate of strawberries and tea accompanied by polite and sophisticated conversation, while watching a cosmopolitan crowd mingling with the religious and with street performers a few feet away. The heart of the philosopher Descartes - "I think, therefore I am," equating truth with consciousness, a profoundly occult idea - is buried at St Germain des Prés as -- supposedly -- are the Merovingian kings, now known to all of us as the alleged bloodline of Jesus. That is, if you subscribe to the theories of The Da Vinci Code and the books it got its ideas from: essentially, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but also The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, and others. 

An aside: in case you are wondering, other than the creation of an ingenious fictional plot as a framework for presenting theories about the sacred feminine there isn't much that is original in The Da Vinci Code, and anyone who is interested in validating or researching its ideas will find them more completely documented in other books published in the last 20 years. That being said, we admire The Da Vinci Code for the fictional canvas constructed to bring many challenging ideas to the attention of the public. 

But Dan Brown's book does Saint-Sulpice a disservice as well: it uses the church as a false lead, a feint, in the search for the Holy Grail. We believe the reason for this is that while the author guessed that there was some importance to Saint-Sulpice, and he correctly associated it with "feminine energies," he was unable to show the role the church actually plays in the occult body and the puzzle so many are trying to decipher. Thus many believe that the secret of Saint Sulpice is yet to be revealed and that the Da Vinci Code, far from resolving it, only cited titillating clues such as the Sulpice (or Paris) Meridian, embedded in the floor of the cathedral -- and offending the church authorities by his account of the "Role Line" along thw way. The global system of meridians and "ley lines" are among the themes which create an extraordinary connection between Saint-Sulpice and the Basye-Orkney Springs new age energy center. The two locations are connected through a network of energies like vital organs in the esoteric body of the planet, analogous to intelligent centers connected by nerve- and circulatory systems. Saint-Sulpice and Basye are, as it were, two essential nodes of a mystical formation. 

From St Germain des Prés and the café Deux Magots, the church of Saint Sulpice is less than a ten minute walk. Aside from being a global energy center in the New Age movement, this fabulous edifice is a container of religious and artistic artefacts. Started in 1646 and constructed over a period lasting well over a century, the structure is venerated by lovers of organ music, of architecture and art - just for starters. Saint Sulpice invites you into its cavernous interior and dazzles you with features -- such as the last frescoes of Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix - that you will simply not find anywhere else. All the art, right down to its specific themes, complements well the fact that Saint Sulpice is believed to emanate a certain spiritual frequency - one that sustains feminine energies and the surrender to unbiased truth. 

Many things in and about Saint Sulpice - its design, its artworks including the Delacroix frescoes, and its curious architectural features including the mysterious "Gnomon" - encourage long meditation. [Image: the bulbous back of the church and the rue Garancière.] As alluded to in the foregoing, the church is known for marking, by means of a copper strip set flush in the floor, the "Sulpice Meridian," which in turn runs about 100 meters -- less than a hair's breadth, on a global scale -- to the west of the Paris Meridian. What is this about? Well, the Greenwich Prime Meridian is today the north-south arc by reference to which local time is set throughout the world. But the Paris Meridian used to serve in this respect, until a little more than a century ago. So through this church runs the line very closely paralleling that by which global time used to be measured - just as Christians measure their spiritual location by reference to the axis provided by the teachings of Jesus. Due to oxidation and for occult reasons, then, the St-Sulpice metal strip has become known in certain circles as "The Rose Line." (Now that Dan Brown has become a pest to theology, Saint-Sulpice has felt compelled to post a notice denying that its Meridian is the Rose Line or that it has anything whatsoever to do with the bloodline of Jesus -- and we think we have to accept those statements on face value. Except... well, more about that later.) The practical use of meridians, other than for establishing time zones, is for mapping, navigation and for astronomical measurement. The occult function of meridians has to do with spiritual orientation and what in reference to meditation would be called "attunement," and these are not such foreign concepts to the original purposes for which the Sulpice Meridian was set: to mark the solstices and equinoxes, and to verify the "nutation" (or "obliquity") of the earth's axis. 

In fact the so-called "southern plaque," which marks summer solstice in the floor of the church along the "Rose Line," says (in Latin) the following:

SOLSTITIUM AESTIVUM 
ANNI MDCCXLV 
PRO NUTATIONE AXIOS TERREN 
OBLIQUITATE ECLIPTICAE 

The translation would be: "Summer Solstice - Year 1775 - For the nutation of the earthly axis [and] the obliquity of the ecliptic." 

"Obliquity" is another term for axial tilt (of the earth's polar axis), or in this case the tilt or angle of the earth's axis with the respect to the sun (or the ecliptic). "Nutation" is a related term, which in general designates the wobbling or nodding or an object in rotational motion, such as a top. In astronomy nutation refers to a periodic wobble or nodding of the earth's axis. This wobble is caused primarily by the gravity of our moon.  

No one has yet written on the occult aspect of nutation, which is that it is a very low frequency (a duration of about 18.6 years) vibration of the earth. It is in effect a background energy state, physically caused by variations in the magnetic pull of the tides. This is not the place to write on occult nutation either, except to mention that it refers to a vibration caused by mental and pure energy variations, instead of physical variations such as posed by the tides. In the case of the Basye Vortex, which is of course subject to planetary nutation or "shaking" along with everything else, there is a secondary nutation due to the difference in vibration between the Christian and pre-Christian (pagan, native American) elements in place.

From the point of view of the church in Paris, all of this had to do with identifying the exact moment of the summer solstice and of course of the spring equinox and hence of Easter while accounting for the slight variation in the angle of sunlight caused by nutation -- a pursuit that demonstrates the surprisingly ravenous appetite of theology for precision. It is an attempt to fix the moment, as if the essential moment of the resurrection, the Christian equivalent of the "God particle," were in that very instant most aligned and most revealed. It speaks to the interesting relationships between theology and astronomy on the one hand, and the role astronomy in the mystical doctrines of both Christianity and the New Age on the other. The church of Saint Sulpice is thus a huge device, bridging theology and science, for accessing the interiority of matter, the energy of the Christ. 

This is the idea that is behind the fascination with (and confusion about) the "Rose Line." The various attempts to mystify the line are just attempts to focus attention - to understand the theological and scientific concepts behind it. The idea is that somehow, matter (that is to say, the entire "presentation" of the physical universe) is penetrable, that there is an interiority to it, a dynamic  that explains it, and that consciousness of that interiority is somehow related to our notions of divinity. It aspires to direct access and perception, not just symbolism. The consistent gnostic element in Christian mysticism (that is the most inner aspects of its theological speculation) is a direct connection to the New Age, and it speaks, we believe, to the future of Christianity. What today looks like heresy and irresponsible speculation will, in part at least, become the propulsive energy leading theological thinking into the future. (We say in part, because obviously the very haste to make all these correspondences is introducing a lot of intellectually promiscuous and luridly wrongful theorizing into the picture: but the chaff will be separated from the wheat.. etc.)

While these astronomical correspondences may remain opaque to some visitors, Saint-Sulpice (the church itself) offers a lot. It is widely known for its architecture (mismatched Baroque towers), music (the St-Sulpice organ is world-known), patrons (from Victor Hugo to Catherine Deneuve) and mystical artefacts and artworks beyond the ones already mentioned. Picasso's mistress and model Dora Maar attended Saint-Sulpice until her final days. Core artworks in the church include three murals by the guiding light of romantic art, Eugène Delacroix, and among these is his "Jacob Wrestling the Angel" (detail) - an image that speaks, in dramatic terms, of the meeting of the human and the divine. From that theme, then, we have taken a hint for our task here, which is to serve, to the degree we are able, as a "concierge" - i.e., candle-bearer - and to shed light on the esoteric aspects of the Basye area and Shenandoah Valley. 

If you have questions or comments, we welcome your contacting us via email:

basyevortex | at | yahoo.com.

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