page 118), the great pious works of medieval France, such as the bridges at Avignon and Orléans (see pages 92 and 82), and of central Europe.
THE ALCHEMICAL BRIDGE
The Charles Bridge in Prague, the Czech Republic, is perhaps the best-known man-made object in a city packed with architectural wonders. The bridge has an extraordinary life and history, and a great importance. When completed in the very early fifteenth century the 516-metre-long, stone-built, sixteen-arch bridge not only connected the two halves of the city in spectacular style (an earlier ramshackle affair had been swept away in the 1340s) but also, as the only route across the mighty river Moldau (Vltava) formed a vital trade route that – almost literally – connected Europe to the east. It was – in fact as well as fancy – a bridge between worlds, with both its ends secured by robust guard towers.
The importance of the bridge was recognized from the moment construction started. The foundation stone was laid in 1357 with, it is alleged, the Emperor Charles IV insisting that the event take place at 5.31 am on 9 July. Royal astronomers, mathematicians and those learned men consulted had, apparently, ordained that this moment was auspicious because it enshrined a palindrome comprising all the odd numbers 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1. A palindrome is a sequence of numerals or letters – sometimes arranged in a ‘magic square’ – that either reads the same from different directions or possesses different meanings or pronunciations when read from different direction. For example, ‘a man, a plan, a canal, Panama’ has the same letters from either direction but is not pronounced the same from either direction – to grasp the point try saying ‘amanap lanac a nalp a nam a’.
Medieval Prague was indeed a meeting place of east and west, a melting pot of different cultures and religions. It had a large Jewish community from as early as the tenth century but this suffered waves of persecution culminating in the late twelfth century with an obligation imposed on all Jews to settle in an enclave on the east bank of the Moldau, near the main city square – and thus was created the first Jewish Ghetto. In the mid fourteenth century Charles IV relinquished some of the state power of the Jewish community, and perhaps even consulted rabbis about the construction of the bridge. These men would undoubtedly have enshrined the ancient esoteric wisdom of the Kabbalah, the branch of mystic Judaism devoted to the quest for the origin of life, of creation, and of the nature of the relation between God and man.
A key part of this quest – the code that could explain all – was language itself, in particular the twenty-two ‘foundation letters’ of the Hebrew alphabet which Kabbalists believed was the creation and direct gift of God and pregnant with many layers of meaning. One of the most important Kabbalistic texts – the 2,000 year old Sepher Yetzirah or Book of Creation – states most directly that God ‘ordained’ the letters of the alphabet: ‘He hewed them, He combined them, He weighed them, He interchanged them. And He created with them the whole creation and everything to be created in the future’. So if Kabbalistic rabbis were involved with the ritual of the foundation of the bridge, then the ceremony was evidently of a deeply mysterious nature, akin to casting a spell. This was the age of alchemy and of miraculous transformation, of the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, the ‘elixir of life’ and of attempts to transmute base matter into fine, the material into the spiritual. The construction site of the bridge could have been seen as a vast alchemical laboratory, for bridges are, in their way, a form of alchemy – they transform, they bring life. As Philip Larkin wrote in 1981: ‘All will be ‘resurrected in the single span’.9
A significant clue to the meaning of the foundation ceremony, and to the power of the Kabbalah in fourteenth-century Prague, lies in the story of one of the most remarkable alleged inhabitants of the medieval city – the golem. This is a creature of Jewish legend that – like Adam – is made of mud, but animated by man not God. In consequence the golem was a parody of divine creation, a mere perverse shadow of humanity, lacking a soul but desiring one and given to hubristic displays leading to chaos and, eventually, self destruction. The golem is mentioned in the Talmud and implied in several Old Testament texts, notably Psalm 139:14-16. Here, in most mystic fashion, a being seemingly full of pride addresses God and says: ‘I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned’. An ‘unperfect’ or unshaped substance in Yiddish is ‘goylem’.
The Charles Bridge in Prague was started in 1357 and its fine array of Baroque religious statues was added from the 1680s, turning a stroll across the bridge into a virtual Roman Catholic pilgrimage.
The means of animation was by tradition a deep and closely guarded secret but involved the Kabbalah and the use of certain letters from the Hebrew alphabet and magic words from, no doubt, the ‘book’ in which all about the golem was ‘written’. To deactivate his creation the magician, for such he was, had to remove letters from words to transform their meaning. For example, one legend says, that to bring the golem to life the word ‘truth’ has to be written in Hebrew on its forehead, and to kill it a letter has to be removed from that word that changes its meaning from ‘truth’ to ‘death’. Or to kill the golem the magician had to pronounce the animating word – the magic palindrome – backwards.
For reasons now lost in myth, the golem became closely associated with Prague and, in legend, was created and animated by rabbis as a means of protecting the inhabitants of the ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks. In the early nineteenth century the writer Berthold Auerbach went so far as to identify the learned late-sixteenth-century Prague rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel as the creator of a golem. Interesting, at this very time, the emperor Rudolf II gave active encouragement to alchemists at his court in Prague as they pursued their various vital and curious quests.
Given all this, and assuming some mystic intent, it must be assumed that the palindromic foundation time and date was intended to give the bridge some special quality – to protect it presumably, but perhaps even animate it in some way. And there is another peculiarity about the bridge. Legend says eggs were mixed into the mortar used to bind the stone and recent analysis suggests the old mortar does indeed contain some unusual organic matter.
Why eggs? Well, it is possible that their addition hardened or improved the mortar in some practical manner. But also, of course, eggs are pretty universally regarded as emblems of life, virility, of creation – especially, as it happens, in Islam where mosques often contain an ostrich egg. I remember seeing – to my surprise – a couple perched on the roof of the massive mud-built mosque in Djenne, Mali. The 79th sura, or chapter, of the Koran explains all. This sura – entitled rather intriguingly ‘The Soul Snatchers’ – starts by warning that the hearts of all humanity – including ‘those who snatch away men’s souls’ – will ‘on the day the Trumpet sounds its first and second blast…be filled with terror’. The sura then goes on to discuss creation and states that God ‘spread the earth, and, drawing water from its depth, brought forth its pastures’. This is one English translation of the seventh century Arabic of the original text.10 Other English translations use slightly different words, but in the original Arabic text is the word ‘daha’, which can be taken to mean an elliptical, geoid or, indeed, an ostrich-egg shape. Did the Arabs of the seventh century really know, as suggested through the revelation of the Koran, that the world was of spherical form? This would be an extraordinary insight for the time and is one that current Islamic scholars use to support their argument that the Koran is truly the word of God, for in the seventh century only He knew the shape of the world.
‘Assuming some mystic intent...the palindromic foundation
