by Christopher Fulkerson

This book has too much wrong information to make wading through it a completely agreeable experience. Some of the detail is interesting, even provocative, but Lamy's sense of what constitutes a demonstrated argument is pretty loose, and this cannot be called scholarship. However if you understand that some topics are completely and crazily incorrect, and if you have not before read this type of literary analysis (one can't call it criticism), which puzzles through an author's idiosyncracies of name selection and theme, you might benefit from some exposure to the author's relatively wide reading within Verne's corpus. I think he makes a good case for Verne's debt to George Sand, but this might be a commonplace in Verne Studies. However Verne's addiction to Shakespeare is referenced once only in a footnote, no doubt because discussion of this would not be "secret." Anyone with a scholarly interest in occultism winds up reading some stuff like this, it’s the literary equivalent of picking through garbage looking for gems. It takes patience and can’t be recommended as reliable.  Writings like this are part of the occult, not its explication.   This is one of those books that I would not have bought if I had had a chance to page through it in a bookstore, and I could not make it part of my regular reading. This was bedtime reading, and not the best sort of that.

The strand within the book that is suggestive and relatively relevant is that concerning Verne's method of choosing names. I am persuaded by Lamy that the novels have links to one another in the form of linguistic clues and cues, usually having to do with names, though sometimes having to do with geographical situations. There is not even the clarity of the types of ley-line material that is so disputed in Dan Brown, but the persistence of certain patterns in Verne seems real. It is worthwhile and plausible that many of the name clues are given cryptically. This is scarcely a technique unique to Verne. However what Lamy does with this information is often not very well thought through. I suppose a lot of these remarks are to say that if you are a better thinker and writer than Lamy, you might be able to take up some of these clue strands and write a better study than he does.

Some of the statements are just wild. Lamy seems to think there are forty "stages of the cross" (p. 113). He thinks that the existence of a prayer concerning the discovery of ancient treasures is evidence of such treasures (p. 168). He doesn't know that any church space can be implied by the prayer "Terribilis est locus iste," that this prayer has been set to music for centuries, and that the presence of these words at Rennes-le-Chateau, or any church, is not strange. The translator thinks there were Boy Scouts in France in the Nineteenth Century. One of the crazier footnotes is on page 201, "According to legend, the Grail chalice, which contained the blood of Christ, was green and carved from an emerald that fell from Lucifer's forehead." He thinks it is not a proven fact that ocean pressure increases with depth (p. 208).

The grossest inaccuracies are about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Lamy thinks that because Bram Stoker was (he says) a member of that occult order, since Stoker wrote Dracula this is "proof" that the Golden Dawn was all about vampires. This is scurrilous of course. Even if other GD members were interested in vampirism, this is not evidence that that is what the order's teaching were about. When Aleister Crowley sharpened his teeth he had long since been expelled from the order. And even then did that have to do with vampirism? Lamy says "It should be noted that after WWII the Russians launched a vast inquiry into vampirism in Hungary" (p. 211). Well, Mr. Lamy, if it were possible to make such note, an actual reference would help.

Some leads are vague and possibly scurrilous but it may be that the book can be mined for these, as long as it is understood that you may be mining to prove the mine bare. If Emma Calve was at Claude Debussy's, or in his circle, this could be one factual lead to the Priory of Zion's claim that Debussy was an occultist and their Grand Master, which isn't too great a leap if you know Debussy. But don't take Lamy's word for it. It might be interesting to look into St. Enimie, whom Lamy mentions in passing, to find out what that character is made of. Lamy thinks the Merovingian kings were called "hairy," and this may be, but he misses the fact that "Caesar" too means “hairy,” and he doesn't seem to have the Biblical depth to know that in the context of religious, if not completely occult, teachings this probably brings up the whole question of the distinction between a Nazarean and a Nazarite.  This would be real explication.   Lamy doesn't know how to do more than intimate such things from rather a distance.

On his last page Lamy says "Perhaps this musing is all lunacy." For once he seems insightful. This book is at best pretty casual reading.

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First Posted 12/19/2011. This update of 1/9/2012 was first posted 1/9/2012.

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