A mariner’s compass made around 1719 carries a small fleur-de-lis at the top of its card, marking north. Nobody knows for certain why it is there. The same flower appears on the badge of the Scouts, on the flag of Quebec, and on the Medici arms, and by 1180 it is fixed on the seals of the kings of France.
What survives are explanations, written by people with reasons of their own. More than a century after the first seal, a monk at Saint-Denis wrote that its three leaves stood for faith, wisdom, and knighthood. Some six hundred years after him, the alchemist Fulcanelli looked at a carving at Lisieux and read the same flower as the emblem of the sovereignty of science, and he knew the monk’s text well enough to quote it. The explanations disagree with each other, and the oldest objects point somewhere none of them went.
A King’s Mark
The flower is older than the seals. The nineteenth-century scholar Demay finds a fleuron on the sceptres and crowns of kings as far back as Charlemagne, and in germ on the royal seals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Under Philip II Augustus the flower takes its fixed shape, and Hervé Pinoteau records a single fleur-de-lis on his counter-seal from 1180. By 1465 it is something a king can give away. That May, Louis XI granted Piero de’ Medici the right to add the French lilies to the Medici arms, and a lily that a king could grant was a lily the crown considered its own.
None of these records says what the flower means, and two modern authorities see no need for it to. A former Garter King of Arms, writing in 1951, called the fleur-de-lys “really an ornament, and not a symbol.” Michel Pastoureau, whose Traité d’héraldique (1979) is the standard reference, calls the question of its origin a problem of little importance. Neither accounts for why the same mark sits on a king’s sceptre, a royal seal, a burial shroud, and the north point of a compass.
A Monk, a Legend, and the Virgin
Around 1300 the silence breaks. In the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, where the kings of France are buried, a monk named Guillaume de Nangis is writing a chronicle in Latin. The kings, he says, bear a lily flower painted with three leaves, as if telling the whole world that faith, wisdom, and the prowess of knighthood serve their kingdom more abundantly than any other. The higher leaf in the middle is faith. The two matching leaves are wisdom and knighthood, standing guard. Then he adds a rule: fides gubernatur et regitur sapientia, faith is governed and ruled by wisdom, and defended by knighthood.
About seventy years later the royal translator Raoul de Presles offers Charles V a different reason, and he has a throne to defend. Charles was a Valois, his family had taken the throne in 1328, and Edward III of England was claiming it by 1340. In the prologue to his translation of Augustine’s City of God, Presles writes that the three lilies are borne in sign of the blessed Trinity and that an angel brought them to Clovis, the first Christian king.
Pastoureau notes that several works of the mid-fourteenth century, most of them written to support the Valois against Edward III, tell the same story, some eight hundred years after Clovis. A Latin poem on the origin of the fleurs-de-lis, written at Joyenval around 1350 and edited by Robert Bossuat in 1940, belongs to the same years. Whether the legend preserved something older or was composed for the moment, the documents date its writing to the years of that dispute.
A third reading, which the art historians Hindman and Spiegel call the most obvious meaning associated with the fleur-de-lis, belongs to the Virgin Mary. Pinoteau notes lilies on the coins of towns under Mary’s patronage before the year 1000, though he warns against reading the emblem as purely Marian or purely royal.
Fulcanelli’s Reading
Fulcanelli is the pseudonymous author of Le Mystère des cathédrales (1926) and Les Demeures philosophales (1929 or 1930), two books that read French Gothic and Renaissance buildings as encoded alchemy. Describing a carving at Lisieux, he calls it a heraldic fleur-de-lys, emblem of the sovereignty of science, which later became the attribute of royalty. He also reverses the order. The seals show a flower that kings used first, and Fulcanelli says it was an emblem of knowledge before it was ever royal.
Fulcanelli knew Nangis too. He quotes the gloss and credits it to the Annales of Nangis: faith, wisdom, and chivalry, with the two leaves guarding faith. At the château of Coulonges he reads two roses as the white and red works of alchemy, with a fleur-de-lys beneath them as the crown of the philosopher, the seal of Science and Faith united with the double spiritual and temporal power of Knighthood. The monk’s faith, wisdom, and knighthood come back in his words almost intact.
Alchemists guarded their teaching, so a reading first printed in 1930 may be older than its publication. No alchemical text before Fulcanelli is known to apply the heraldic emblem to alchemy, which leaves the link resting on reasoning from context.
A Flower That Points North
Away from the books, the flower had a quieter job. A Royal Museums Greenwich record dates a mariner’s compass to about 1719 and says that “the North point is marked by a fleur-de-lis.” The usual explanation credits Flavio Gioia, a pilot of Amalfi, but historians treat him as legend. Nothing has replaced the story, so when and why the flower started marking north is unsettled.
Robert Baden-Powell took the north mark for the Scout badge. In Scouting for Boys (1908) he called it the arrow head, which shows the north on a map or on the compass, and later renamed it for the fleur-de-lis. A flower that first appears in this record on a king’s sceptre has since marked north for sailors, badged a youth movement, and flown over a province.
The Fleur-de-Lis Before the Crown
The shape is far older than any of this, and where it sits tells more than what anyone called it. A Cypriot gold roundel of about 1600 to 1050 BCE in the Metropolitan Museum carries four flowers of the same outline, each apparently bound at the base, on a type of ornament the museum says probably adorned funerary shrouds. An Etruscan bronze cup of the sixth century BCE has a three-part flower on top of its looped handle, which the museum calls a lotus finial. A Roman-Germanic horse ornament of the second or third century CE sets the flower on a pelta, a crescent-shaped shield that the museum says served in the Roman period as protection from the evil eye. The flower crowns the handle and the shield, and the sceptres and crowns that come later put it in the same place, at the top of the thing.
Pastoureau traces the motif back through Greek, Roman, and Gaulish coins to Egyptian bas-reliefs and Mesopotamian cylinders, and on the oldest Assyrian examples he knows it already seems to mark royalty, on tiaras, necklaces, and sceptres. Between the Roman coins and Charlemagne the record is thin, and no known object closes it. Every explanation of the French flower, from the monk onward, was written about a form that had been in use for thousands of years.
A Mark for the Meeting Point
Every explanation of the fleur-de-lis that survives comes from a writer attached to a house, a court, or a doctrine: a monk at the royal abbey, a translator working for a disputed throne, and an alchemist with a teaching to support. No two give the flower the same job, and all of them were explaining something they had inherited.
The objects have no such loyalties, and they share one habit. The flower is put at the top: the handle of an Etruscan cup, the king’s sceptre, and the north of a compass card, the direction of the pole the heavens turn on. The shape suits the job. A centre, two sides, and a band at the base make a fair diagram of an axis, the place where something above meets something below. The old stories point the same way. In the Clovis legend an angel, a messenger between heaven and earth, delivers the lilies, and the first book of Kings puts lily-work on the tops of the two pillars at the temple’s entrance.
This is a reading, and it rests on the objects. The same mark stands at the top of spires, ridges, and pillars, the highest points of old buildings, and a sign for the meeting of heaven and earth suits the part of a building that stands between them. Researchers of the Old World hold that its structures were built to draw on the energy of the aether, and a finial at the top of such a building is where that connection would be made.
Whether the shape reached the seals of 1180 through an unbroken line of ornament or was taken up again later, the objects do not say. The monk, the translator, and the alchemist each explained the flower to suit his own reasons. The mark itself kept to its post for longer than any of them lived. Whatever it was first made to say, it said it by where it stood.
