The Trickster's Path - Decoding Philippe de Chérisey's CIRCUIT

Philippe de Chérisey’s Circuit has long been relegated to the margins: cited in footnotes, whispered about in esoteric circles, but seldom treated as a text worthy of careful study. Its mixture of playful verse, cryptic references, and seemingly disordered pairings of Tarot and folklore/history has discouraged sustained analysis, leaving the work in a state of obscurity. This book sets out to redress that imbalance. My aim is not simply to describe Circuit but to decode it—to show that Chérisey’s eccentric text conceals a deliberate structure. In these pages I will reconstruct the “circuit” he implies: a path traced through symbols, myths, and landscapes that binds together history, geometry, and the imagination - so dear to those who study the mystery at Rennes-le-Château. What follows is not an idle commentary but an attempt to decode the random wordplay as a structured puzzle, one that asks the reader to follow Cherisey's path through the myth, geometry, landscape and history. Each chapter of this work will retrace the steps of that circuit—testing correspondences, weighing alternatives, and assembling the fragments of an esoteric itinerary that Chérisey scattered with his trickster’s hand. My purpose is not to impose certainty but to show the logic of the game. Circuit is written in the spirit of the labyrinth: one enters it not to exit quickly, but to discover its turns, its crossings, its moments of recognition. If I have succeeded, this book will serve as both a guide and a mirror: a guide through the shifting terrain of Chérisey’s invention and intellect, and a mirror of the reader’s own instinct for pattern, order, and meaning. For what Chérisey called “circuit” may prove to be less a fixed path than a way of reading—an art of seeing correspondences where others see only confusion. Let us therefore enter Circuit with patience, rigour, and a touch of play.

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