“Just as the human soul has its secret folds, so the cathedral. An entirety, which extends beneath the church floor, constitutes the crypt (from the Greek Κρυπτός, hidden). In this low, damp, and cold place, the observer experiences a singular sensation that commands silence: that of power united with darkness. We are here in the asylum of the dead, as at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, necropolis of the illustrious, as in the Roman Catacombs, cemetery of the Christians. Stone slabs; marble mausoleums; sepulchers; historical debris, fragments of the past. A mournful and heavy silence fills the vaulted spaces. The thousand noises from outside, those vain echoes of the world, no longer reach us. Are we about to emerge into the caves of the Cyclopes? Are we on the threshold of a Dantesque inferno, or in the underground galleries, so welcoming, so hospitable to the first martyrs?–All is mystery, anguish, and fear in this obscure cavern… Around us are numerous, enormous, massive pillars, sometimes paired, standing on their broad, chamfered bases. Short, squat, sober capitals with little projection. Rough and crude forms, where elegance and richness give way to solidity. Thick muscles, contracted under effort, which unfailingly share the formidable weight of the entire edifice. A nocturnal, mute, rigid will, tensed in a perpetual resistance to being crushed. Material force that the builder knew how to order and distribute, giving all these members the archaic appearance of a herd of fossilized pachyderms, welded to one another, rounding their bony backs, hollowing their petrified bellies under the thrust of an excessive load. A real but occult force, which exerts itself in secret, develops in the shadows, acts without respite in the depths of the work’s substructures. Such is the dominant impression experienced by the visitor while traversing the galleries of the Gothic crypts.”

Fulcanelli, 1922