First of all it is necessary for me to say a word about the term gothic as applied to French art, which imposed its rules on all the productions of the Middle Ages and whose influence extends from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.

Some have claimed—wrongly—that it came from the Goths, the ancient Germanic people. Others alleged that the word, suggesting something barbarous, was bestowed in derision on a form of art, whose originality and extreme peculiarity were shocking to the people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such is the opinion of the classical school, imbued with the decadent principles of the Renaissance.

But truth, preserved in the speech of the common people, has ensured the continued use of the expression gothic art, in spite of the efforts of the Academy to substitute the term ogival art. There was an obscure reason for this, which should have made our linguists ponder, since they are always on the look-out for the derivation of words.

How does it come about that so few compilers of dictionaries have lighted upon the right one? The simple fact is that the explanation must be sought in the cabalistic origin of the word and not in its literal root. Some discerning and less superficial authors, struck by the similarity between gothic (gothique) and goetic (goetique) have thought that there must be a close connection between gothic art and goetic art, i.e. magic.

For me, gothic art {art gothique) is simply a corruption of the word argotique (cant), which sounds exactly the same. This is in conformity with the phonetic law, which governs the traditional cabala in every language and does not pay any attention to spelling. The cathedral is a work of art goth (gothic art) or of argot, i.e, cant or slang.

Moreover, dictionaries define argot as ‘a language peculiar to all individuals who wish to communicate their thoughts without being understood by outsiders’. Thus it certainly is a spoken cabala. The argotiers, those who use this language, are the hermetic descendants of the argonauts, who manned the ship Argo. They spoke the langue argotique-—our langue verte (‘green language’ or slang)—while they were sailing towards the felicitious shores of Colchos to win the famous Golden Fleece.

People still say about a very intelligent, but rather sly, man: ‘he knows everything, he understands cant.’ All the Initiates expressed themselves in cant; the vagrants of the Court of Miracles—headed by the poet Villon—! as well as the Freemasons of the Middle Ages, ‘members of the lodge of God’, who built the argotique masterpieces, which we still admire today. Those constructional sailors (nautes) also knew the route to the Garden of the Hesperides….

Le Mystere des Cathedrales, Fulcanelli