So, yesterday, @nyarlathotep posted the below amazing fractal in this amazing post...
I thought it was worthy of an entire story, and he gave me permission to feature his art, so, here we go ... it's worth WAY more than a thousand words, as you will soon see!
The cathedral at Alleaume had stood for 759 years -- or 800, depending on where you started counting.
It was just as strange to see a crater where it had once been – perhaps even stranger – than watching the cathedral at Notre Dame burn.
At least that was understandable.
This was not.
There was no sign of destruction anywhere. It was as if the whole cathedral had been lifted into space. Even assuming there was heavy equipment available to move a massive stone cathedral in one piece, there was no sign that any such equipment had been present.
The town of Alleaume was in indescribable grief, and regional law enforcement was completely dismayed.
It just so happened that Chief Inspector Jean-Paul Dubois from Interpol was nearby investigating a case, and was asked to come over and have a look – after all, it was an international incident, since the cathedral was recognized across the EU and the world as a historical treasure.
Everybody knew who he was – moved over from the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General service after 20 years of service, living as an ex-pat in France since then – a Black man from French Louisiana, taking his time in going home. He certainly had justified his presence in Interpol and in France with a stunning record of solving complex cases, and he was welcomed to Alleaume as a potential hero.
Still, he drew as much of a blank as everyone else at first – in 52 years of life, and having seen some strange things along the way, there was nothing quite like this.
Still, he was able to keep one fact clear in his mind: la vérité est vraie – truth is true. The cathedral was gone. Someone or something had moved it, and that had to be a short list, because either someone and something had worked at superhuman speed overnight to take it down piece by piece – taken down in nine hours what had taken 90 years to construct, without leaving a trace of dust – or had moved it as a whole, and even more daunting prospect.
The story was that the cathedral at Alleaume had been fighting against gravity since the 13th century. It was just a little bit too tall to support its own weight without a lot of help. Help had been applied in the form of flying buttresses, to the point that from a distance, the cathedral looked a bit like some kind of strange spider with extra legs from certain angles. Fine design standards of the day had apparently been set aside just a little. Yet the point was that the instant those flying buttresses were moved from conducting the weight of the cathedral from the walls and roof to the ground, the whole building would collapse. So, how would you lift the cathedral to move it without shattering it – especially given only nine hours to do it?
New question: how far could you get, carrying however-many-millions-of-tons of old stone, and where would you put it to hide it in that same nine hours? Everybody across France was looking – no vehicle or set of vehicles anywhere that large had been seen on the roads or in the air.
“C'est impossible!” the local inspector had cried in despair.
“La vérité est vraie,” Chief Inspector Dubois answered him gently, and wondered to himself how somebody had gotten Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation and a transporter beam to 21st century France. Whatever the engineering and transport explanation was, it would have to be just about that strange.
When the present doesn't offer clues – and it didn't, because except for the crater, it was like the cathedral had never been there – one had actually to look not at a fictional future but to the actual past. Chief Inspector Dubois knew some of the history – Alleaume had been caught up like many French cities and towns with building massive cathedrals in accordance with something called sacred geometry, trying to usher people into the presence of God – the ultimate Practitioner of geometry, of course – by using geometric figures drawn from things built or seen in the Bible, such as Solomon's Temple, or even the cross itself.
Further out than even that: the Masons had not known fractal geometry by that name, but had combined Euclidean geometry to build structures and something like fractal geometry for ornamentation (although they did not know it by that name; they had abstracted it from nature) in order to – again – usher man into the presence of the divine.
The problem, of course, was that the Hebraic and Euclidean measurements did not always translate well into French medieval measures, and did not account for the height desired … the idea of a tower or obelisk being necessary to reach the divine went back to the Tower of Babel and was a common feature of non-Christian practice in religion.
There were even other forms of sacred geometry in different religions, all attempting to accomplish the same things – the mandalas of Hindu religion provided a well-known example of this.
To Chief Inspector Dubois, all of that was history he considered with sadness. He was a Christian, and had been raised Catholic, but once he had read through the books of John and Acts and recognized the simplicity of the original Christian faith, he had walked away. All these extra efforts to come into the presence of God when the Lord Jesus had already said, “This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him Whom He hath sent” – a tragedy. Sacred geometry and all the rest fell into the “extra” category, as extra as Cain bringing collard greens when God had only asked for the sacrifice of a lamb that represented the Lamb of God who would eventually take away the sins of the world. It hadn't come out well for Cain, and it didn't tend to come out well for anyone else who was being all “extra.”
As Chief Inspector Dubois discovered through his research, Alleaume, alas, had been the epitome of “extra.” Like Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, its site had been selected because worship had been going on there for a long time … unlike Notre Dame, the site had not had four churches present beforehand, bridging the gap to the time when rites of Greco-Roman religion had been practiced in a great temple there. Alleaume had a Romanesque mystery cult operating in a temple all the way into the 12th century at the site, powerful enough so that the local Roman Catholic Church had taken its time wresting control of the people of the town and the site from the older religion. That, by itself, was a remarkable fact.
However, the tendency of the Roman Catholic church had always been the tendency of the Roman Empire that had fathered it: to incorporate what it could from what it had conquered to appease the people. Gargoyles, for example, modeled after the lesser icons of the local cult, studded Alleaume as waterspouts, and the figures in the Greco-Roman pantheon that the cult attended to – Jupiter, king of the gods, Helios, god of the sun, Mars, god of war, and Vulcan, god of the forge were chief – were visibly represented both as larger gargoyles and on the stained glass, although somewhat “Christianized” – Jupiter and Helios became the father and the son, with two warlord-looking angels!
Meanwhile, the quest for height had led to the first disaster: construction at Alleaume's new cathedral had started in 1170 and had vaulted itself into the sky by 1215 only to have the roof cave in on the nave and kill everybody on the site. The transsept began to crumble a day later, forcing the bodies that had not already been pulled out to have to be temporarily abandoned, desecrating the site. Rumors had swirled that the members of the old cult that had survived and still practiced their rites in the local woods had put a curse on the new cathedral.
Meanwhile, the bishop in charge of the project had merely fired the first team of architects and builders and declared a contest across Christendom for a new team to come in and start the project over. Alleaume had never been without a place of worship – the bishop knew the people had to have something to worship or they would go back to the old ways, and the Roman Catholic church had worked too hard to get firmly into Alleaume to get put out. He had a little leeway to work with, having sprinkled holy water on himself, the local priests he had ordered to help him, and the roof blocks of the nave and transsept the day he had personally gone in to get the remaining bodies out. The villagers considered that only Christians would take a chance like that, and so the bishop had bought the church time.
In 1219, a local group of builders and architects was awarded the opportunity to rebuild the cathedral and started work – to Chief Inspector Dubois, this had been a surprise. Obviously, they had succeeded where the first group had failed; they and their trained successors had completed the cathedral at Alleaume by 1260 and it had stood without great difficulty (a few new buttresses here, a bit of steel reinforcement there in modern centuries) until outright disappearing in 2019. Why had they not just gotten the job at the beginning – it would have saved a lot of trouble, and many lives!
And then again … with an eerie feeling, the chief inspector realized the second team had given the shape to Alleaume that people knew well, that made it unique. Stable? Yes it was, but it was … odd. The second team had gotten the roof and its point up – a perfect obelisk such that the sun god Ra himself would have been proud of, for originally, such things had been built in Egypt to honor that god. The second team had gotten all the figures revered by the old cult back into the design of the building … and the reason it looked odd at certain angles was perhaps that it did not resemble a Latin cross. It was sort of rounded off … and accounting for extra legs, it resembled a spider at odd angles … or perhaps a scarab beetle, something to go with that obelisk.
Maybe the Catholic church had won the battle in Alleaume in the 12th century, but lost the war in the 13th century …
Still odder: Chief Inspector Dubois had gone on and looked up some aerial images of both the cathedral and the crater it had left. Accounting for how the buttresses had been situated, the figure indeed was rounded off … and if you could imagine it lying flat like a coin in the crater, with all its figures in two-dimensional form, you would have a kind of fractal mandala, Jupiter in his red-faced anger ready for war at the head, and all the rest in their ranks around it, the obelisk forming a central figure in the wheel portion of the mandala.
Still odder yet – if this was not yet enough – there were detailed records of the building of the cathedral between 1170 and the disaster in 1215, but other than a constant notation that “prayers were offered every day by and with the new team of builders” from 1219 onward, there was not much detail until BOOM, in 1260, it was all done and dedicated. Given the embarrassment the elaborate detail of the early records must have caused after the collapse in 1215, one could understand someone's reluctance to enter too much about the new stages of work until it was done. Yet in the absence of records such like “In such-and-such a year, the rebuilding of the nave was completed” was striking.
It was as if the work might have started again in 1219 and just been all done then – after all, prayer had been offered at the site daily at least since Julius Caesar had conquered Gaul back some 2,100 years before. That told one nothing of substance about the construction – 1260 was a good-looking date, given that it had taken 45 years to the collapse and four years sitting idle – 90 years gave a grand number for geometry, with 90 being a quarter of the way in degrees around any circle, and the number of the perfect right angle, and the number itself divisible – symmetrical, if you will – into two parts, three parts, five parts, nine parts, 15 parts, 30 parts, even 45 parts … you could work your Euclidean and fractal and sacred geometry all up and around there … prime divisor two for Adam and Eve, prime divisor three for the Trinity, prime divisor five for the fingers and toes, divisor nine because nine was just magic anyway, and divisor ten because, well, ten.
Yet simpler than all that was the thought, because there were no records to the contrary, that in a sense, the cathedral at Alleaume had gone up into its place perhaps as early as 1219 as mysteriously as it had “gone up” out of its place in 2019. And of course, 800 years was geometrically just as pleasing a number as 759 years … and hitting TWO such numbers had to be a boon.
This staggered Jean-Paul Dubois to consider. What was he investigating? Of course it was all impossible! But then again …
“La vérité est vraie” – truth is true, in every century.
Hey, that's great! It's like reading an article about this monument in a historical society's journal, excellent style! And I like how you pass all the questions and references about religion, sacred geometry, maths and ... eldritch things!
I enjoyed reading this a lot, and I am on to the second part now.