Satanic references, masonry and alchemy: the unresolved legends of Antoni Gaudí

The five-pointed star in Parc Güell, the cross of the Eight Beatitudes in the Sagrada Família, the alignment of its buildings ... We compile some of the research that establishes it as the most extravagant and mystical architect of modern Spain.

Casa Milà, the most important civil work of Antoni Gaudí, is a construction of sinuous façades and submarine allure that exhibits its prehistoric rarity in the elegant Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona. Turned into one of the most visited and emblematic monuments of the Catalan architect, today it is hard to think that, in its beginnings, Gaudí did not conceive it only as a residential building, but as a means to an end: in his initial project, commissioned by the Barcelona merchant Pere Milà i Camps, Gaudí had planned to crown the building with a monumental sculpture in honor of the Virgin of the Rosary who, with five meters in height, used La Pedrera as a base.

Unresolved Antoni Gaudi legends masonry alchemy

The set, never carried out, should be made of stone, gold metal and glass, as José Manuel Almuzara recently recalled in an interview, one of the promoters of the beatification of the most extravagant, mysterious and mystical architect of modern Spain . In fact, as the writer Jordi Corominas points out in the fresco of the period he drew in Barcelona in 1912: The Enriqueta Martí case (Flint, 2014), Gaudí "was a green dog who donated the one hundred and five thousand pesetas that he earned from his work in La Pedrera to the Jesuit Ignasi Casanovas to be assigned to works of charity. "Since the Marian monument was not possible, at least his fees would have a religious meaning.

Gaudí, in many ways, is even today an enormously mysterious, even literary, character, judging by the stories and anecdotes that have circulated about his life, and that researchers do not know if cataloging as a story or a legend. Especially, the first years of his career as an architect lend themselves to speculation. Although there is little doubt about his sincere conversion to Catholicism in 1894, after a period of voluntary fasting, the truth is that until then Gaudí had declared himself an atheist, had frequented Masonic groups (something, on the other hand, very common in Barcelona's the time) and had made decisions that, seen from a certain perspective, still present edges and corners of shadow.

The theories of the conspiracy that defend Gaudí's occultist past have been primed with a peculiar fact: to project his first work, the factory of the Cooperativa Obrera Mataronense, completed in 1882, Gaudí chose a strange scale in his plans : 1/666. This fact, which can be easily verified in this academic article, could have been a coincidence or a macabre wink, but the truth is that it is not the only satanic reference that researchers of all kinds (some rigorous, others not so much) have detected in his work. The decoration and constructions of the famous Parc Guell, a private estate built and decorated by Gaudí between 1900 and 1914, have numerous inverted five-pointed stars, a satanic symbol par excellence.

Was Gaudí an occultist? It does not seem easy to assure it with certainty. But it is also true that his vision of religion and the sacred was, at least, heterodox. The abundance of symbols that runs through his work has made rivers of ink run, because it is virtually inexhaustible. And the epicenter is, curiously, his most decidedly Catholic work, the expiatory temple of the Sagrada Familia that he began to build in 1892 and in whose works he lived, almost like a hermit, until he was run over by a tram and died in 1926. "No It is coincidental that the location of the Sagrada Familia is located in the geometric center of Barcelona ", explains the historian and popularizer Nacho Ares in the chapter dedicated to Gaudí in the second volume of La historia perdida.

Ares cites the work of another researcher, Josep Guijarro (Magical Barcelona Guide), who states that "the cathedral rises just above the imaginary line that joined in place where the old megalithic monuments of the neighborhood of Camp de l 'were located. Arpa and those that surely there was in Monjuïc ". The Holy Family, which Gaudí could not see concluded, abounds in symbols associated with different occult, esoteric and hermetic traditions, employs Templar elements (the cross of the Eight Beatitudes that forms the basis of the pinnacles), and astrological (the symbols of the zodiac ).

In a way, its presence, like that of the alchemical symbols of Parc Güell or that of the frustrated Mariano monument of La Pedrera, sketch a shocking idea: that of a city, Barcelona, ​​surrounded or protected symbolically by magical buildings that dialogue with each other . Today it may seem an extravagant idea, but the decades of Entresiglos were fertile ground for all kinds of esoteric phenomena. Gaudí's own personal evolution, which over the years would become an ascetic consecrated to the infinite construction of the Holy Family, who adopted extravagant diets and habits and who, when he died trailed by a tram, was taken by a beggar, can be read almost like a cliché of a decadent novel.

The rediscovery of Gothic at the end of the 19th century had brought with it the ghosts of the alchemical tradition, Satanism and sects. This is the case, for example, in the pages of Down There (1891), a fascinating novel by Joris Karl Huysmans in which a researcher penetrates the satanic circles of Paris through its medieval ruins. Or in The Mystery of the Cathedrals, a bestseller of the occult written in 1922 by an enigmatic writer-alchemist named Fulcanelli. Gaudí died before the book saw the light (it was published in French in 1926), so he could not know those theories that related the medieval cathedrals with the always elusive philosopher's stone. In any case, in view of the dense unresolved symbolic fabric that still surrounds his life and his work, it seems clear that Gaudí always considered his work to go beyond architecture.