Arcanum Paradoxa

Ostensibly the forerunner of modern chemistry and usually considered a ‘pseudo-science’ Alchemy first emerged in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. At roughly the same time, a form of Alchemy associated with medicinal aspects of Taoism emerged in China.
The general objective of Alchemy was the creation, through transmutation, of some type of marvellous, quintessential substance, often considered a miraculous elixir, a panacea, for curing all ills, bestowing immortality or spiritual enlightenment.
Known as the art of Khemeia, Alchemy had its theoretical basis in metallurgy, Zoroastrianism, Stoic pantheism and Aristotle’s Four Element theory of matter. The first significant exponent of Alchemy was Bolos ‘Democritus’ of Mendes (circa 200BC) whose treatise, Physika et Mystica, dealt with dyeing and colouring, the creation of gems, silver, and the transmutation of metals, specifically the transmutation of lead or iron, into gold. One tenet of alchemical doctrine was that the prime matter (prima materia) or raw material of transmutation comprised the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements. Common or ‘despised’ material, both ‘contemptible and precious’, formed the basis of The Work, the opus alchymicum.

There is a secret stone, hidden in a deep well, worthless and rejected, concealed in dung and filth... (Johann Daniel Mylius: Philosophia Reformata, 1622)

Khemeia did not flourish during the Roman era, as various Emperors, notably Diocletian, feared that the transmutation of base metals into gold would undermine economic stability. A notable exponent of the Work in later times was the mystic Zosimos of Panopolis (Akhmim) whose Hermetic Encyclopaedia (a 28 volume compilation of existing and original texts) is dated 300CE. However, as Khemeia was considered ‘pagan learning’, much ancient knowledge of the art was lost during the Christian riots in Alexandria in 400CE.
The Arabs revived interest in Khemeia in the seventh century, as part of a general fascination for Greek science and thought. In the Arabic language the word ‘Khemeia’ became ‘al-kimiya’ and it was this form of the word that became the European term ‘alchemy’.
To define Alchemy as a pseudo-scientific forerunner of modern, scientific chemistry is an oversimplification. From the earliest times Khemeia comprised a resonant, symbolic framework for imaginative speculation. This speculative aspect of the art soon overshadowed its ‘practical’ metallurgical objectives, leading to a well-deserved aura of obscurantism and uncertain interpretation.
In the period between Bolos and Zosimos, Holmyard observes, ‘alchemical speculation ran riot’ as diverse practitioners created a complex body of doctrine, ascribing symbolic meanings to the sequence of metallic colour changes, incorporating all contemporary strands of speculative thought into alchemical theory, including Egyptian magic, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Babylonian astrology, Christian theology and pagan mythology.
Works of Khemeia were invariably couched in an ‘enigmatical and allusive language’ and often ascribed to semi-legendary or mythical authors such as Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Moses, Miriam (the legendary sister of Moses), Agathodaimon, Theophrastus, Ostanes, Cleopatra and the goddess Isis. Thus, almost any contemporary, metaphysical speculation was assimilated into eclectic alchemical thinking: many sayings, stories and myths were endowed with alchemical interpretation, or incorporated into the Hermetic worldview.
By the Byzantine era Stephanos of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who flourished during the reign of the Emperor Herakleios I (610-641), had come to view Khemeia as primarily a ‘mental process’. Following F. Sherwood Taylor, E. J. Holmyard quotes Stephanos’ denigration of practical alchemy as a "burden of weariness", observing that by this time (the seventh century) alchemy had ‘very largely become a theme for rhetorical, poetical and religious compositions, and the mere physical transmutation of base metals into gold was used as symbol for man’s regeneration and transformation to a nobler and more spiritual state’.
So, well before the rise of medieval European alchemy, the tendency to regard The Work as an internalised, psychic process or phenomenon was established. Khemeia could easily be dissociated from physical chemistry and metallurgy and defined as some kind of ‘spiritual’ discipline. Now, the objective was not the transmutation of external phenomena, but the transmutation of the adept himself, and this transformative process was expressed in an obscure, introspective, mythic vocabulary of symbols and complex terminology.
In modern times a fascination with alchemy as an internalised, mental process has been continued by the Surrealists and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). During the inter-war years and roughly around the same time both Jung and the Surrealists claimed Alchemy as significant in their respective investigations:

…let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory… (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930)

Jung and the Surrealists (particularly Andre Breton and Max Ernst) were operating against the backdrop of a revival of interest in alchemical symbolism in France and Germany. The works of Zosimos had been translated into French and published by Berthelot and Ruelle in 1887-1888. Herbert Silberer, who proposed a connection between alchemical thought and modern psychology, had anticipated Jung’s researches.
In France the Surrealists were influenced the alchemical novels of Francois Jolivet-Castelot and the esoteric writings of Fulcanelli and Grillot de Givry. De Givry drew attention to the hermetic influences at work in the art of painters like Bosch, Bruegel, Cranach and Baldung. Initially Andre Breton saw alchemical thought as a way of re-investing poetic language with a sense of mystery: this soon evolved into a more ambitious proposition, the deployment of an ‘alchemy of language’ to transform consciousness, and by transforming consciousness, change life.
On the other hand Jung’s interest in alchemy was triggered by an ancient Taoist text called The Secret of the Golden Flower translated by Richard Wilhelm and for which he wrote a commentary in 1929. As a result of this work he was motivated to research Western Alchemy, which he subsequently defined as ‘the historical counterpart to my psychology of the unconscious’, and a bridge between Gnosticism and the modern world.
The culmination of these explorations was Jung’s attempt to correlate the ‘transpersonal’ element of his psychological paradigm with modern physics. The ultimate acausal reality or, to use the medieval term, unus mundus, forming the underlying transformative matrix of alchemical processes, can be understood, he argued, as simultaneously both psychic and material. This underlying unus mundus is both the indeterminate universe of psychic symbols and the pre-geometric, ‘implicate order’ of high-energy physics.
At the heart of Jung’s Analytical Psychology is the process of Individuation or self-becoming. Individuation is a non-linear, centralizing developmental process culminating in an enhanced synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious spheres. This synthesis also incorporates a paradoxical harmonisation of contradictory elements, a union of opposites – including, for example, the masculine and feminine principles, the animus and anima – correlating with the alchemical coniunctio as symbolised by the hermaphrodite or androgyny.
Jung felt that elucidation of the opus alchymicum would shed light on the symbolic structure of the Individuation process, because the alchemist’s hope of creating philosophical gold was only a partial illusion: ‘for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious.’
If the alchemists projected the process of Individuation into the phenomena of chemical change, then the same is true for the poet who, likewise, by a synthesis of automatism and active imagination, projects the same process into the phenomena of poetic (artistic) creation. He or she initiates a transmutation of the ‘prime matter’ of language into the aesthetic ‘gold’ of poetry.
Part of this process is a sustained regression into the sphere of the unconscious (the ‘dizzying descent into ourselves’ mentioned in the Second Manifesto) during which imprints of the individual’s psychological and biological development are uncovered in symbolic form. Thus, the alchemical process, by engaging with the Individuation process, establishes a psychobiological frame of reference for both psychological development and imaginative, poetic creativity (‘inspiration’).
Alchemy, viewed from the Jungian perspective, can be seen as a quest for inner psychic unity and wholeness (actualisation) achieved through a non-rational mode of self-knowledge. However identification of poetry (or perhaps the poem itself) with the alchemical arcanum paradoxa and defining poetic inspiration in the context of a psychobiological, existential substrate, highlights a conflict with conventional ideas tending to categorise writing and/or poetry, as ‘literature’.
Academic and other definitions of poetry as ‘literature’ displace the poetic act of imaginative creation from the interior psychobiological universe to the external world of cultural-linguistic structures where the preferred paradigm is communicative. Furthermore, the current ‘postmodernist’ cultural-linguistic aesthetic model presupposes that everything depends upon language and linguistics to the extent that ‘being’ itself becomes literally indefinable in non-semiotic, extra-linguistic terms. This inevitably inhibits understanding of artistic creativity as in innate psychoactive phenomenon effectively blocking access to sources of inspiration in the indeterminate quantum vacuum of the unus mundus.
The raison d’etre of the ‘literary’ paradigm is communication. In contradistinction, the raison d’etre of the ‘alchemical-surreal’ paradigm is transformation: transformation energised by inspiration, where ‘inspiration’ is defined in terms of psychic energy. In this paradigm of transformation the Jungian valuation of symbols (distinguished from ‘signs’) as ambiguous emanations of non-linguistic or extra-linguistic or even pre-linguistic being is a key factor.
For Jung the psychic presence of symbols (including ‘archetypal’ symbols) is always experienced as ‘numinous’, a categorical term he borrowed from the Kantian-Friesian religious thinker Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto was seeking to extend or deepen the epistemological scheme of his predecessor Jakob Friedrich Fries. This scheme included the notion of Ahndung, a German term which can be translated as ‘aesthetic sense’. Otto expanded the meaning of Ahndung ‘beyond the merely aesthetic’ by introducing the category of ‘numinosity’, the alleged quality of the sacred.
Otto argued that numinosity is the prime characteristic of the collective experience underlying all religions. This experience can involve a sense of overwhelming power, the mysterium tremendum. The mysterium stands as the first cause of all ‘religious awe’, and, in certain respects, if one follows Jung in the matter, accounts for the sense of power and autonomy apparently exhibited by unconscious contents and symbols.
The association of archetypal symbolism with cross-cultural mythic imagery on the one hand, and Otto’s numinosity concept on the other, was one way that Jung, through his writings and researches, endowed psychological processes such as Individuation with ‘spiritual’ qualities. Part of the attraction of Jungian psychology is his overt identification of self-becoming, or personality formation, with the model of the spiritual quest, articulated through an all-pervasive symbolism shared with the alchemical magnum opus, other mystical belief systems or even mainstream theological precepts. As Anthony Storr explains, Jung was able to do this because he identified the integrated Self with an archetypal symbol of totality identical with the underlying reality of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, the imago Dei.
If the raw material of poetry is language, the essence of poetic practice is active imagination or artistic creativity. It is inevitable that imaginative creativity, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage with that innate process of psychological integration Jung called Individuation. From this perspective the poem may appear as a by-product of the process. For the poet, as for the alchemist, the psycho-activity of inspiration arising from the process of self-becoming is the prime factor. It is this psycho-active effect which dissolves the barriers between the conscious and the unconscious, exposing the subject to the autonomous ‘power’ of symbolic otherness, enhancing creative capability.
For many this dissolution is most satisfactorily defined as an ‘archetypal’, visionary, even mystical, experience. Indeed, for some, even the most wilfully mundane or blatantly secular poems can still radiate, however feebly, an aura of the ‘numinous’, investing the text with all the fascination of an alien artefact.
Grounding poetic practice in a fundamental, psychobiological, ontological matrix de-emphasises, even dissociates, ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic epiphenomenal ‘foreground’ superstructure of modern ‘literary’ discourse. It is also the case that, contrary to Jung’s position, pro-active engagement with the principium individuationis from an aesthetic perspective may not accord with traditional ‘religious’ paradigms of human perfectibility or divine purpose.
Thus, the alchemical process of inner purification may well amount to a Promethean affront to doctrines of redemption and predestination. Then, the poet, like the alchemist of old, may stand accused of Faustian occultism – or even the heresy of the Free Spirit, interestingly defined by Vaneigem as ‘an alchemy of individual fulfilment’. The declaration of intent in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism to attain the ‘total recovery of our psychic force’ through a ‘systematic illumination of hidden places’ and excursions into ‘forbidden territory’ must be understood in the context of Romantic metaphysical revolt in the tradition of Miltonic Satanism, Byron and Sade. It is not an affirmation of the ‘spiritual quest’, or the unio mystica described as the supreme desideratum by Jung and other exponents of perennial, pan-religious syncretism.
Furthermore Jung’s identification of the integrated Self with any ‘divine’ reality or purpose is open to question in the post-religious context that is the present evolutionary situation of society. Primordial being may exert or radiate a ‘numinous’ attraction of otherness, or the subject may experience such an inspirational effect. It does not follow that experience of this effect is experience of the ‘sacred’. This is true, even if the effect or experience can be shown to be the result of a quasi-objective incursion of, or from, the unus mundus. Only those predisposed, perhaps by cultural conditioning, to a totalising ‘religious’ reading of fundamental experiences can promote such an interpretation without fear of contradiction. Again, if the raw matter of the procedure comprises the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements, such common or ‘despised’ material. Stuff ‘of no price or value’ (Dyas Chemica Tripartita) will also form the basis of the poet’s Work. Such poetic work is unlikely to meet with approval from the custodians of cultural probity, the proponents of canonical, high-minded artistic or literary greatness.
Is the true poet an exceptional individual?
If the answer is yes, then poetry will reflect the compulsion of such individuals to seek their own path and forge their own identity through an oracular, alchemical poetry, which, like the ancient works of Khemeia, may well appear enigmatical and allusive to the uninitiated.
Digital art: Inner Alchemy III, 2001
Arcanum Paradoxa was published by Atlantean Publishing in The Monomyth Supplement 44, January 2009
Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy Of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy WebsiteOstensibly the forerunner of modern chemistry and usually considered a ‘pseudo-science’ Alchemy first emerged in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. At roughly the same time, a form of Alchemy associated with medicinal aspects of Taoism emerged in China.
The general objective of Alchemy was the creation, through transmutation, of some type of marvellous, quintessential substance, often considered a miraculous elixir, a panacea, for curing all ills, bestowing immortality or spiritual enlightenment.
Known as the art of Khemeia, Alchemy had its theoretical basis in metallurgy, Zoroastrianism, Stoic pantheism and Aristotle’s Four Element theory of matter. The first significant exponent of Alchemy was Bolos ‘Democritus’ of Mendes (circa 200BC) whose treatise, Physika et Mystica, dealt with dyeing and colouring, the creation of gems, silver, and the transmutation of metals, specifically the transmutation of lead or iron, into gold. One tenet of alchemical doctrine was that the prime matter (prima materia) or raw material of transmutation comprised the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements. Common or ‘despised’ material, both ‘contemptible and precious’, formed the basis of The Work, the opus alchymicum.

There is a secret stone, hidden in a deep well, worthless and rejected, concealed in dung and filth... (Johann Daniel Mylius: Philosophia Reformata, 1622)

Khemeia did not flourish during the Roman era, as various Emperors, notably Diocletian, feared that the transmutation of base metals into gold would undermine economic stability. A notable exponent of the Work in later times was the mystic Zosimos of Panopolis (Akhmim) whose Hermetic Encyclopaedia (a 28 volume compilation of existing and original texts) is dated 300CE. However, as Khemeia was considered ‘pagan learning’, much ancient knowledge of the art was lost during the Christian riots in Alexandria in 400CE.
The Arabs revived interest in Khemeia in the seventh century, as part of a general fascination for Greek science and thought. In the Arabic language the word ‘Khemeia’ became ‘al-kimiya’ and it was this form of the word that became the European term ‘alchemy’.
To define Alchemy as a pseudo-scientific forerunner of modern, scientific chemistry is an oversimplification. From the earliest times Khemeia comprised a resonant, symbolic framework for imaginative speculation. This speculative aspect of the art soon overshadowed its ‘practical’ metallurgical objectives, leading to a well-deserved aura of obscurantism and uncertain interpretation.
In the period between Bolos and Zosimos, Holmyard observes, ‘alchemical speculation ran riot’ as diverse practitioners created a complex body of doctrine, ascribing symbolic meanings to the sequence of metallic colour changes, incorporating all contemporary strands of speculative thought into alchemical theory, including Egyptian magic, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Babylonian astrology, Christian theology and pagan mythology.
Works of Khemeia were invariably couched in an ‘enigmatical and allusive language’ and often ascribed to semi-legendary or mythical authors such as Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Moses, Miriam (the legendary sister of Moses), Agathodaimon, Theophrastus, Ostanes, Cleopatra and the goddess Isis. Thus, almost any contemporary, metaphysical speculation was assimilated into eclectic alchemical thinking: many sayings, stories and myths were endowed with alchemical interpretation, or incorporated into the Hermetic worldview.
By the Byzantine era Stephanos of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who flourished during the reign of the Emperor Herakleios I (610-641), had come to view Khemeia as primarily a ‘mental process’. Following F. Sherwood Taylor, E. J. Holmyard quotes Stephanos’ denigration of practical alchemy as a "burden of weariness", observing that by this time (the seventh century) alchemy had ‘very largely become a theme for rhetorical, poetical and religious compositions, and the mere physical transmutation of base metals into gold was used as symbol for man’s regeneration and transformation to a nobler and more spiritual state’.
So, well before the rise of medieval European alchemy, the tendency to regard The Work as an internalised, psychic process or phenomenon was established. Khemeia could easily be dissociated from physical chemistry and metallurgy and defined as some kind of ‘spiritual’ discipline. Now, the objective was not the transmutation of external phenomena, but the transmutation of the adept himself, and this transformative process was expressed in an obscure, introspective, mythic vocabulary of symbols and complex terminology.
In modern times a fascination with alchemy as an internalised, mental process has been continued by the Surrealists and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). During the inter-war years and roughly around the same time both Jung and the Surrealists claimed Alchemy as significant in their respective investigations:

…let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory… (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930)

Jung and the Surrealists (particularly Andre Breton and Max Ernst) were operating against the backdrop of a revival of interest in alchemical symbolism in France and Germany. The works of Zosimos had been translated into French and published by Berthelot and Ruelle in 1887-1888. Herbert Silberer, who proposed a connection between alchemical thought and modern psychology, had anticipated Jung’s researches.
In France the Surrealists were influenced the alchemical novels of Francois Jolivet-Castelot and the esoteric writings of Fulcanelli and Grillot de Givry. De Givry drew attention to the hermetic influences at work in the art of painters like Bosch, Bruegel, Cranach and Baldung. Initially Andre Breton saw alchemical thought as a way of re-investing poetic language with a sense of mystery: this soon evolved into a more ambitious proposition, the deployment of an ‘alchemy of language’ to transform consciousness, and by transforming consciousness, change life.
On the other hand Jung’s interest in alchemy was triggered by an ancient Taoist text called The Secret of the Golden Flower translated by Richard Wilhelm and for which he wrote a commentary in 1929. As a result of this work he was motivated to research Western Alchemy, which he subsequently defined as ‘the historical counterpart to my psychology of the unconscious’, and a bridge between Gnosticism and the modern world.
The culmination of these explorations was Jung’s attempt to correlate the ‘transpersonal’ element of his psychological paradigm with modern physics. The ultimate acausal reality or, to use the medieval term, unus mundus, forming the underlying transformative matrix of alchemical processes, can be understood, he argued, as simultaneously both psychic and material. This underlying unus mundus is both the indeterminate universe of psychic symbols and the pre-geometric, ‘implicate order’ of high-energy physics.
At the heart of Jung’s Analytical Psychology is the process of Individuation or self-becoming. Individuation is a non-linear, centralizing developmental process culminating in an enhanced synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious spheres. This synthesis also incorporates a paradoxical harmonisation of contradictory elements, a union of opposites – including, for example, the masculine and feminine principles, the animus and anima – correlating with the alchemical coniunctio as symbolised by the hermaphrodite or androgyny.
Jung felt that elucidation of the opus alchymicum would shed light on the symbolic structure of the Individuation process, because the alchemist’s hope of creating philosophical gold was only a partial illusion: ‘for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious.’
If the alchemists projected the process of Individuation into the phenomena of chemical change, then the same is true for the poet who, likewise, by a synthesis of automatism and active imagination, projects the same process into the phenomena of poetic (artistic) creation. He or she initiates a transmutation of the ‘prime matter’ of language into the aesthetic ‘gold’ of poetry.
Part of this process is a sustained regression into the sphere of the unconscious (the ‘dizzying descent into ourselves’ mentioned in the Second Manifesto) during which imprints of the individual’s psychological and biological development are uncovered in symbolic form. Thus, the alchemical process, by engaging with the Individuation process, establishes a psychobiological frame of reference for both psychological development and imaginative, poetic creativity (‘inspiration’).
Alchemy, viewed from the Jungian perspective, can be seen as a quest for inner psychic unity and wholeness (actualisation) achieved through a non-rational mode of self-knowledge. However identification of poetry (or perhaps the poem itself) with the alchemical arcanum paradoxa and defining poetic inspiration in the context of a psychobiological, existential substrate, highlights a conflict with conventional ideas tending to categorise writing and/or poetry, as ‘literature’.
Academic and other definitions of poetry as ‘literature’ displace the poetic act of imaginative creation from the interior psychobiological universe to the external world of cultural-linguistic structures where the preferred paradigm is communicative. Furthermore, the current ‘postmodernist’ cultural-linguistic aesthetic model presupposes that everything depends upon language and linguistics to the extent that ‘being’ itself becomes literally indefinable in non-semiotic, extra-linguistic terms. This inevitably inhibits understanding of artistic creativity as in innate psychoactive phenomenon effectively blocking access to sources of inspiration in the indeterminate quantum vacuum of the unus mundus.
The raison d’etre of the ‘literary’ paradigm is communication. In contradistinction, the raison d’etre of the ‘alchemical-surreal’ paradigm is transformation: transformation energised by inspiration, where ‘inspiration’ is defined in terms of psychic energy. In this paradigm of transformation the Jungian valuation of symbols (distinguished from ‘signs’) as ambiguous emanations of non-linguistic or extra-linguistic or even pre-linguistic being is a key factor.
For Jung the psychic presence of symbols (including ‘archetypal’ symbols) is always experienced as ‘numinous’, a categorical term he borrowed from the Kantian-Friesian religious thinker Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto was seeking to extend or deepen the epistemological scheme of his predecessor Jakob Friedrich Fries. This scheme included the notion of Ahndung, a German term which can be translated as ‘aesthetic sense’. Otto expanded the meaning of Ahndung ‘beyond the merely aesthetic’ by introducing the category of ‘numinosity’, the alleged quality of the sacred.
Otto argued that numinosity is the prime characteristic of the collective experience underlying all religions. This experience can involve a sense of overwhelming power, the mysterium tremendum. The mysterium stands as the first cause of all ‘religious awe’, and, in certain respects, if one follows Jung in the matter, accounts for the sense of power and autonomy apparently exhibited by unconscious contents and symbols.
The association of archetypal symbolism with cross-cultural mythic imagery on the one hand, and Otto’s numinosity concept on the other, was one way that Jung, through his writings and researches, endowed psychological processes such as Individuation with ‘spiritual’ qualities. Part of the attraction of Jungian psychology is his overt identification of self-becoming, or personality formation, with the model of the spiritual quest, articulated through an all-pervasive symbolism shared with the alchemical magnum opus, other mystical belief systems or even mainstream theological precepts. As Anthony Storr explains, Jung was able to do this because he identified the integrated Self with an archetypal symbol of totality identical with the underlying reality of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, the imago Dei.
If the raw material of poetry is language, the essence of poetic practice is active imagination or artistic creativity. It is inevitable that imaginative creativity, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage with that innate process of psychological integration Jung called Individuation. From this perspective the poem may appear as a by-product of the process. For the poet, as for the alchemist, the psycho-activity of inspiration arising from the process of self-becoming is the prime factor. It is this psycho-active effect which dissolves the barriers between the conscious and the unconscious, exposing the subject to the autonomous ‘power’ of symbolic otherness, enhancing creative capability.
For many this dissolution is most satisfactorily defined as an ‘archetypal’, visionary, even mystical, experience. Indeed, for some, even the most wilfully mundane or blatantly secular poems can still radiate, however feebly, an aura of the ‘numinous’, investing the text with all the fascination of an alien artefact.
Grounding poetic practice in a fundamental, psychobiological, ontological matrix de-emphasises, even dissociates, ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic epiphenomenal ‘foreground’ superstructure of modern ‘literary’ discourse. It is also the case that, contrary to Jung’s position, pro-active engagement with the principium individuationis from an aesthetic perspective may not accord with traditional ‘religious’ paradigms of human perfectibility or divine purpose.
Thus, the alchemical process of inner purification may well amount to a Promethean affront to doctrines of redemption and predestination. Then, the poet, like the alchemist of old, may stand accused of Faustian occultism – or even the heresy of the Free Spirit, interestingly defined by Vaneigem as ‘an alchemy of individual fulfilment’. The declaration of intent in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism to attain the ‘total recovery of our psychic force’ through a ‘systematic illumination of hidden places’ and excursions into ‘forbidden territory’ must be understood in the context of Romantic metaphysical revolt in the tradition of Miltonic Satanism, Byron and Sade. It is not an affirmation of the ‘spiritual quest’, or the unio mystica described as the supreme desideratum by Jung and other exponents of perennial, pan-religious syncretism.
Furthermore Jung’s identification of the integrated Self with any ‘divine’ reality or purpose is open to question in the post-religious context that is the present evolutionary situation of society. Primordial being may exert or radiate a ‘numinous’ attraction of otherness, or the subject may experience such an inspirational effect. It does not follow that experience of this effect is experience of the ‘sacred’. This is true, even if the effect or experience can be shown to be the result of a quasi-objective incursion of, or from, the unus mundus. Only those predisposed, perhaps by cultural conditioning, to a totalising ‘religious’ reading of fundamental experiences can promote such an interpretation without fear of contradiction. Again, if the raw matter of the procedure comprises the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements, such common or ‘despised’ material. Stuff ‘of no price or value’ (Dyas Chemica Tripartita) will also form the basis of the poet’s Work. Such poetic work is unlikely to meet with approval from the custodians of cultural probity, the proponents of canonical, high-minded artistic or literary greatness.
Is the true poet an exceptional individual?
If the answer is yes, then poetry will reflect the compulsion of such individuals to seek their own path and forge their own identity through an oracular, alchemical poetry, which, like the ancient works of Khemeia, may well appear enigmatical and allusive to the uninitiated.

Arcanum Paradoxa was published by Atlantean Publishing in The Monomyth Supplement 44, January 2009
Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy Of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy Website
 

Digital art: Inner Alchemy III, 2001

Against The World

 

THE PSEUDO-CARPOCRATIAN TRACTATUS CONTRA MUNDUM

 

A Brief Bibliographical History

 

 

 

 

The Tractatus Contra Mundum (Tract Against The World) was written in Greek by an unknown Hellenistic author in the year 203AD. This text, which displays powerful Gnostic cosmological features, was falsely attributed by its anonymous author to the notorious heretical teacher, Carpocrates of Alexandria.

However it is true that, on a superficial level, the Tractatus, does invite comparison with some ideas of Carpocrates – given what is known of them from the prejudiced writings of the theologian Irenaeus of Lyon. Many modern commentators, it should be noted, have long recognised that Irenaeus, who fulminated against the Carpocratians for immorality (whilst ridiculing their metaphysics) in his Libros Quinque Adversus Haereses (AD199), was ignorant of the fundamentals of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and was, therefore, prone to misinterpretation. Furthermore, the Carpocratian ‘libertine gnosis’ is now defined as just one of many manifestation of an antinomian ‘spiritual’ or existential, tendency intrinsic to the human condition; such tendencies are much better understood in our ‘post modern’ epoch than in the third century. Why the anonymous author chose to attribute his or her text to the notorious and much-vilified Carpocrates must remain a mystery.

Perhaps he or she was a schismatic Carpocratian?

Perhaps the author(s) wished to take advantage of a certain aura of controversy surrounding this anathematised heretic?

 

                 A partial history of the Tractatus was uncovered in the eighteenth century by the eccentric English antiquarian Barnabas Scarfe. His compendious book Ye Reliques of Olde Norfolke (1749) refers in some detail to a volume called Opus Contra Mundum (The Work Against The World), found in a London book shop on an inhospitable, rainy, autumnal day in 1738.  Scholars have since identified this as a copy of the so-called ‘Paris edition’ of 1718, itself an expurgated reprint of a version of the Opus issued in Germany under that incorrect title in the year 1618.

The Opus Contra Mundum, known as an ‘engraved variant’, was an illustrated version of the original Pseudo-Carpocratian text, reproduced, so far as we can tell, with scrupulous faithfulness to the original, but accompanied by an extensive and elaborate, theosophical, Hermetic-Alchemical commentary.

 The heavy, macabre engravings illustrating the volume give the impression of some Faustian Grimoire, and, without doubt, it was this magical-hermetic imagery (and the accompanying, convoluted, even opaque, exegesis) that first attracted Scarfe to the volume.

               After extensive researches on the continent in the years 1740 to 1741, involving travels in France, Germany and the Balkan countries; after searching numerous dusty and forbidden archives, Scarfe traced the Opus Contra Mundum to its source manuscript. Some experts dispute Scarfe’s theory, but nevertheless we will explain it here, as it is still the only coherent account extant.

               Scarfe eventually tracked down, and indeed obtained, a rare copy of the 1599 Eisleben edition of the Tractatus Contra Mundum during a stay in Moldavia in 1741. This was not, of course the first printed edition of the text which, we now know, appeared in Thuringia in 1587. However, the owners of the 1599 version also provided our indefatigable antiquary with a short, printed pamphlet (undated) which contained an account the traditional origin of the work written in a peculiar and outmoded form of scholastic Latin.

Thus Scarfe learned of the Gariannonum Manuscript, copied and illuminated by the Monks of St. Fursa in the year of Our Lord 632. It was this document (transcribed in awe and trepidation from a decaying Latin original) which, despite condemnation by the Holy See, circulated in the ensuing centuries among secret sects of initiates in Central Europe.

Scarfe was in no doubt of the significance of this information, having engaged in antiquarian researches into the origins of Fortress Gariannonum, built by the Romans on the Norfolk coast in AD275 as part of the Litus Saxonicum. In the Post-Roman era Gariannonum was, of course, known as Burgh Castle, but in the seventh century, the ascetic Monks of St Fursa established a monastery within the abandoned walls of this forbidding, ancient fortress. Before the arrival of the Romans the site was, according to local archaeologists, an Iron Age cult centre of the Iceni tribe, the locus of unspeakable rites.

 

Scarfe’s 1599 copy of the Tractatus Contra Mundum is not present in the archives at Buckden Palace, neither is the strange little pamphlet. We know of his researches only through his voluminous letters, and extensive references in the first edition of Ye Reliques of Olde Norlfolke integrating the tales of the Gariannonum Manuscript with the folklore of his native East Anglia.

Much of this has been summarised by Wlosok in his invaluable Die Philosopische Gnosis aus Pseudo-Carpocrates of 1965.

As a modern scholar, Wlosok was aware of the more complex history of the text. Permitting himself a tone of understandable scepticism with regard to the outdated researches of Barnabas Scarfe, he devotes equal space to an almost-complete Aramaic Version of the Tractatus. This version was unearthed in 1928 by a team of Italian archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, in the Nile Valley south of Cairo.

 Copies of this papyrus, obtained in difficult circumstances, were made by specialists, but most were destroyed by the Nazis and the Italian Fascists during the war years. Fortunately Wlosok gained access to one of the few remaining copies in a private collection in Vienna. This text, translated into elegant and poetic French by Alexandre Rollin, provides new insight into the history of the Pseudo-Carpocratians.

The accretions to this version, which differs in minor but significant details from the Latin version, disclose a more ancient perspective. The author of the commentaries, possibly a high initiate in the movement, claims an extensive lineage for the cosmology and doctrine of the original Tractatus.

We are told that the Alexandrian Pseudo-Carpocratians were known to themselves as Charontes and claimed to be the inheritors of a tradition dating back to the times of the Babylonian Empire, or earlier. To indicate this they also referred to themselves as the ‘Muttabriqu-Saghulhaza’, or simply the ‘Saghulhaza’ meaning, in an ancient pre-Babylonian language, ‘Upholders of Evil’. The term ‘Muttabriqu’ means ‘She Who Erases’. The real significance of this nomenclature is unclear, but the Charontes took pains to dissociate themselves from all other religions, ‘secret’ mysteries and cultic superstitions. These they condemned out of hand as childish illusions and distractions.

The Oxyrhinchus author defines this ancient language as ‘Chaldean’, an obviously fanciful invention. He says that the Saghulhaza were persecuted, and almost exterminated, by an ancient bloodthirsty, tyrannical king called ‘Akurgal’. Wlosok identifies this personage as Akurghal of Lagash who reigned about 2465BC. The extreme antiquity of these events is startling, but Wlosok is not apologetic, noting that the Aramaic initiate depicted a mythic ‘proto-Gnostic’ emanationist (Wlosok’s terms) schema of divine origins, stretching back to the dawn of time and the creation of the cosmos.

In this tradition the ‘gods’ of the Saghulhaza belief system, known as ‘Isua’, ‘Khubilkhu’ or sometimes ‘Tiruru-Geshthu-e’, were born into an epoch of darkness in a ‘time before the stars’. These divine pre-stellar entities perpetuate themselves in ‘our world’ through various modes of metamorphosis or ‘transmigration’. Each trans-aeonic incarnation or re-incarnation, being, in fact, another stage in a cosmic ‘fall’, leading to a progressive diminution of divine potency. To them, and their worshippers, ‘our world’ is an abomination, a degraded sphere of creation inspiring nothing but negation and hatred.

The purpose of Saghulhaza initiation was to bestow insight into the process of transmigration, to assist in a mighty task ‘against’ the nature of ‘our world’ (the hiemarmene, to use a Gnostic term familiar to the Hellenistic Alexandrians). This task is a reversion of the transmigration process; an infinite war against the Light to regain primordial darkness.

The original Carpocratians were denounced for believing that the only way to overcome the power of the angelic hegemony, the hiemarmene, was ‘to commit every deed there is in the world’, including sinful deeds. This liberation could only be accomplished by living through a series of lives or re-incarnations. The Pseudo-Carpocratians assimilated this idea but distorted it almost beyond recognition, attributing the desire for liberation from ‘our world’ to the divine, angelic oppressors themselves.

The need for brevity ensures that only a fragmentary outline of the complex system of the Tractatus Contra Mundum can be described in this note. Interested readers seeking further clarification are referred to Rollin’s lengthy article in Revue d’Assyrologie 25 (1932) entitled ‘Le recit epique des Khubilkhu’. We must discount the pseudo-science of discredited folklorist Vincent Roke, whose idiosyncratic researches into Scarfe’s unreliable observations are rejected by most serious students.

 

In summary we have recounted the bibliographical history of this curious document. From the lost Greek original, to the 1718 Paris edition based upon the Garionnonum Manuscript transcribed by the Monks of St. Fursa, eventually issued, in a rare printed version, in Thuringia in 1587. We have also described the more recently discovered Aramaic variant, also, in part, a copy of the lost Greek primary text, translated into French in 1930.

What became of the lost original?

Allusions in the Aramaic commentaries (tantalisingly incomplete at this point) infer that fanatics destroyed many Pseudo-Carpocratian texts; this was in the turbulent and dangerous years AD390-391. Zealous Christians, encouraged by Theodosius the Great, attempted to eliminate all traces of heresy and paganism, even burning Alexandria’s precious Sarapeion Library in their successful bid to establish a new religious or theocratic hegemony, throughout the known world.

Many secrets were lost during the terrible events surrounding the destruction of the Sarapeion; it is not inconceivable that diligent archaeologists and historians may yet uncover further clues regarding the identity of the original Pseudo-Carpocrates - but, for the time being, we can only speculate.

illus: Sphinx Galactica, 2003

 

Gnosticism Unmasked

 

In his book Psychonaut (1987), Chaos Magic theorist Peter J Carroll says the Gnostics were ‘true anarchists of the spirit’. For Carroll, Gnosticism represents a unique theology of revolt, a subversive doctrine of anti-morality and radical cosmological value-reversal. Gnosticism is presented as an integral belief system incorporating techniques of either libertinism or asceticism to implement a quasi-magical, esoteric programme. These ‘spiritual anarchists’ were, he claims, such a threat to the religious status quo (‘the black order of hierarchical Christianity’) that, unsurprisingly, they were violently suppressed by the authorities. Such, in a nutshell, is one of the many common perceptions of the phenomenon of Gnosticism, or the ‘Gnostic Religion’.

Both among the general public and the intelligentsia interest in this subject peaked in the years following the Second World War. In fact there is the possibility that what is commonly called ‘Gnosticism’ is – in the light of the insuperable obstacles encountered by researchers in the field – a product of the mid-twentieth century. It is a cultural artefact of the modern age with hardly any connection to the religious beliefs of late antiquity, a ‘Procrustean paradigm’ (Williams) obscuring the true dynamics behind textual sources.

Prior to 1945 this assemblage of belief systems and sects was approached mainly from the viewpoint of the early Christian heresiologists (Irenaeus, Hippolytus of Rome, Pseudo-Tertullian, Epiphanius of Salamis) whose writings, naturally, condemned ‘Gnostics’ as heretics: believers in irrational, blasphemous teachings – perversions of ‘true’ faith.

As the nineteenth century progressed scholars became more concerned with the simplistic exercise of symbol derivation – tracing the inheritance of motifs and symbols in art and literature across various cultures and time zones – and aside from the speculations of occultists, Gnosticism was of interest only in these contexts.

The occult approach to the subject may be exemplified by Crowley’s book The Vision and The Voice (written 1900-1909) as it draws upon the system of personified Aeons (the thirty Aethyrs) found in the Angelic works of Dr John Dee. This was a magical-spiritual system indirectly derived from ancient sources considered ‘gnostic’ or, more likely, Neo-Platonic. Other esoteric interpretations of Gnosticism abound in the occult community, while Neo-Gnostic churches with their roots in the nineteenth century, such as that founded by the Patriarch Synesius (Fabre des Essarts), still flourish in various forms today.

In the late nineteen fifties the study of Gnosticism attracted attention among a wider readership, partly due to the seminal study Les Livres secrets des Gnostiques d’Egypte (1958) by French expert Jean Doresse. But it was The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (1958, 1963) by Hans Jonas that probably did more than any other work to cement the image of the ‘revolutionary’ gnostic vision in the popular consciousness and the developing anti-establishment counter-culture.

Jonas surveyed many relevant belief systems from a phenomenological perspective and codified many influential themes and motifs. Also, he linked the gnostic corpus to the pervasive notion of social crisis and made telling comparisons with Existentialism. For many, the allure of ‘secret books’, ‘hidden knowledge’, ‘the alien god’ and antinomian, anti-cosmic pessimism proved irresistible. It is this complex of psycho-spiritual ideas that crystallised the idea of ‘Gnosticism’ as many understand the term today. Perhaps the secret books of the gnostic sects, like the Necronomicon of H P Lovecraft and its many spin-offs, hold the keys to ancient mysteries and new, perhaps terrible, readings of human destiny.

When faced with teleological crisis, disruptive social change or political disaster the fearful imagination retreats into the murky underworld of the collective unconscious, the theological undergrowth of unorthodox speculation. The apparently ‘counter-traditional’ nature of supposed ‘gnostic’ belief systems presents the onlooker with a rich vein of appropriate symbolism. Here is a dark and anguished picture of the cosmos – a universe created by inimical powers. This identification gave rise to what some exasperated experts have referred to as a ‘menu of clichés’, the inflation of a jargon term – Gnosticism – into a fashionable category. A category that soon became so all-inclusive as to prove a hindrance to understanding.

Richard Smith and Ioan Culianu have listed the wide-ranging use of the term Gnosticism in modern times. Thus we find the term applied to the poetry and prophetic books of William Blake, Moby Dick, the psychology of Jung, Communism, Nazism and Existentialism. Albert Camus claimed that the Marquis de Sade was a Gnostic. The philosophy of Hegel as been defined as ‘gnostic’ along with Psychoanalysis, Marxism, James Joyce, Yeats, Kafka and the novels of Herman Hesse, to name but a few movements and authors swept up into the ‘gnostic’ stew. Even more recently ‘gnostic’ motifs and images have surfaced in the lyrics of musician Tori Amos who finds that Jesus was a Christian feminist. Some claim that science itself is ‘gnostic’. Culianu came to regard the term as a ‘sick sign’ a bucket term that has come to mean far too much – that is to say nothing at all. Clearly he was right.

The catalyst for the post-war fascination with Gnosticism was the discovery in Upper Egypt in 1945 of the collection of documents known as the Nag Hammadi Library. The ‘discovery’ of ancient manuscripts or inscriptions, arcane messages from a distant age, is itself an evocative event, bringing to mind exotic adventures in far away lands and the exploits of popular heroes like Indiana Jones or Alan Quatermain. In the Introduction to Rider Haggard’s novel She: A History of Adventure (1887) we find a reproduction of a facsimile of the ‘Sherd of Amenartas’, an ancient amphora fragment inscribed with the legend of Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, the Sorceress of the Caves of Kor. The ancient, enigmatic text is a gateway to mystery, adventure and wild imaginings. For many the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts evoked the same ethos.

Reportedly discovered by locals engaged in a melodramatic blood feud the small cache of ancient Coptic texts were unearthed in a red earthenware jar in the caves at Jabal al-Tarif near the town of Nag Hammadi. This library comprised thirteen codices (twelve intact and one surviving only in a few pages) and eventually became the property of the Coptic Museum in Cairo. This collection comprises the largest single surviving set of Coptic translations of original Greek devotional works dating from the 2nd or 3rd Century or possibly earlier. Each codex contains a number of tracts, some anthologies more wide-ranging than others. For example Codex I (known as the Jung Foundation Codex) contains five tractates while Codex VI contains eight works, including the famous ‘voice of the revealer’ paradox poem Thunder, Perfect Mind. On the other hand Codex X contains only one work and Codex VIII merely two. One item The Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John is included several times and seems to be the most popular and respected tractate in the collection.

The entire library soon became popularly known as The Gnostic Gospels – unfortunately not one of the 52 tractates in the entire collection mentions the word gnostikos/gnostikoi (or the Coptic equivalent of that Greek term) even once. How very odd – very odd indeed!

Even among the sects anathematised by heresiologists close analysis shows that it is virtually impossible to identify any group of believers who actually used ‘Gnostic’ as a label of self-definition. Although the sects use a variety of nomenclature, including Pneumatics, Seed, Elect, Race of Seth, Race of the Perfect Human and Immovable Race the name ‘Gnostic’ is not among those used by devotees. In any case there is a need to distinguish between ‘Gnosticism’ and ‘gnosis’. The term ‘gnosis’ can refer to any mode of mystical knowledge, whereas the term ‘Gnosticism’ implies a generalised unity, some form of coherent, established, historical movement, system or religious organisation. Gnosticism means The Gnostic Religion, an entity for which ‘there is no evidence and against which there is much,’ to quote Michael Allen Williams. The idea of specialised mystical knowledge (‘gnosis’) as a factor defining a particular set of believers is widespread among many different religions – it is a very broad term of little analytical value.

The provenance of the collection remains a matter of speculation. One should draw a distinction between the possible custodians of the Codices and their producers. Williams speculates that the books may have been produced by fourth century Egyptian monks interested in examining questions of divinity and spiritual techniques for attaining transcendence of the created order. The writers of these scriptures would, at the time of composition, have found nothing un-Christian about the contents of the tractates. However the diversity of the contents has given rise to conflicting theories about the ownership and purpose of the collection. Possibilities include a particular sect of unknown designation; a heresiological resource used to refute unorthodox arguments; a haphazard collection maintained as general reading matter before the imposition of strict orthodoxy in biblical literature by Bishop Athanasius (in the year 367).

The codices fall into four rough groupings comprising items from the Corpus Hermeticum, part of Plato’s Republic and two other sets: ‘demiurgical’ texts and ‘non-demiurgical’ texts – among the latter there are items on the subject of Baptism and the Eucharist.

This brief survey highlights the particular group of texts defined as ‘demiurgical’, or to be precise ‘biblical demiurgical’. It is the demiurgical myth pattern that emerges as a particular type of revelation tradition within the Codices of interest to researchers concerned with the issue of ‘Gnosticism’. It might appear that these tractates indicate a religious innovation in the context of orthodox Christian teaching, and this might indeed be the case. However one must be clear on two points: firstly that all these texts are within the sphere of Judaic Scriptural exegesis, and secondly, that the demiurgical idea is not unique to Judaism, Christianity or an emerging new doctrine of ‘Gnosticism’. In fact the myth pattern is an import from older philosophical traditions, specifically from Platonism.

The main source of the demiurgic myth is Plato’s dialogue Timaeus (circa 448 BC).

The term demiurge (demiourgos) means ‘producer’, ‘workman’ or ‘creator’. In Timaeus the demiurge is the creator of the visible, material world – the sensible, mundane universe made from the four elements. That the material universe is a copy of an ideal universe existing only in the realm of Ideas or Forms, is an essential point of the Platonic mythic pattern. The Timaeus pattern is an example of cosmogenesis of the emanationist type. In this kind of system, by virtue of its secondary status, the ‘real’ world of human beings is already perceived as a degraded mode of existence, a downward emanation from a purer form of spiritual being.

However this kind of hierarchy also extends to the entities that inhabit the lower world. The demiurge created not only the Soul of the World, but also the stars and a caste of ‘lower gods’. It is these lower gods who are responsible for the creation of the mortal bodies of men, although the demiurge is thought responsible for their immortal souls.

In later antiquity this scheme was subject to vast elaboration and, as in the original Platonic system, the demiurge was differentiated from the ultimate principle of Good, a moral category closely associated with the Ideal Universe of Forms. Greek Christians and Jewish scholars influenced by Neo-Platonism and other aspects of Greek thought soon identified the demiourgos as the Creator God of Genesis. This is the origin of the biblical demiurgic tradition, a mode of Judaeo-Christian theological speculation that over time has given rise to the idea of ‘Gnosticism’. This analysis would exclude other religions or sects that promoted a dualistic vision – thus Manichaeans and Mandeans are not to be classed as ‘Gnostics’. While ‘classic gnostic’ works such as The Apocryphon of John should properly be seen as variations of the Judaic scriptural tradition, not a separate religion with a unique ‘revolutionary’ or ‘anarchic’ attitude. The two distinguishing features being (1) a distinction between the ‘ultimate’ transcendent deity (‘God’) and the Creator God of the Bible and (2) the theme of a message of reawakening (salvation) sent from the higher realm. This higher realm is clearly a variant of the Platonic ideal realm of Forms, later vulgarised in the familiar notion of a celestial Heaven.

Given that the terminology associated with ‘Biblical Demiurgy’ is a more viable and clear than that associated with ‘Gnosticism’ some experts argue that this category provides the only fruitful avenue for further research. One can but agree with this assumption, even if it spells the end of a romantic love affair with a fictional anti-establishment religion.

It remains to examine the motivations, if not the origins, of this variant tradition within Judaeo-Christian speculation.

The particular character of Biblical Demiurgical myths derives from moral preoccupations. Salvation ideology is above all an ideology of moral purity. The notion of ‘evil’ is therefore, not only central to the redemptive ethic typical of the Christian tradition (and all other puritan moral doctrines world-wide), it is also a notoriously difficult concept to integrate into a framework determined by a supernatural principle of ultimate Goodness.

The difficulties arising from the problem of evil and other anomalies or peculiarities in scripture (anthropomorphic characterisations of the deity, for example) account for the particular character of the Biblical Demiurgical constellation of mythic systems. It is strenuous attempts to deal with these concerns of Theodicy, sometimes in the face of satire and criticism from non-Jews and non-Christians that lead to the innovations enshrined in some of the Nag Hammadi Codices.

Michael Allen Williams draws attention to elements of Genesis that were well known as problem features of the scripture. For example, in Gen 1:26 the creator is referred to in the plural (“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”). Other stories, such as the Sin of Adam and Eve (the Paradise story); the Descent of the ‘Sons of God’; The Flood story and related tales of The Tower of Babel or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (similar to the Platonic myth of Atlantis), all presented problems of exegesis. Innovative mythmakers constructed elaborate scenarios to account for the anthropomorphism and perceived moral difficulties of these texts.

If the very notion of jealous or angry deity worked against the idea of transcendent spiritual serenity, the Platonic demiurge provided a very convenient solution. Clearly the creator of ‘this world’ of sin and suffering was not an omnipotent, all seeing, Supreme Being incapable of evil, but the work of a ‘lower’ emanation or entity in the role of ‘creator’. Classic ‘gnostic’ texts are typical of this kind of early Christian hermeneutic speculation, giving rise in the natural course of events to sects and sub-sects later condemned as heretics. Modern commentators who seek to present ‘Gnosticism’ as a pessimistic ‘anticosmic’ religion of revolt with a special essence that sets it apart from the mainstream are clinging to a distorted caricature vision – despite their diversity and variation all the original ‘gnostic’ texts known to us are, in fact, Christian. There never was a distinctive unified counter-traditional religion of revolt known to its adherents as ‘Gnosticism’.

Furthermore it is quite misleading to see the writings under discussion as a radical departure from the norms of early Christian and Judaic moral thinking. It is only to be expected, given the entrenched misogyny of all faiths based on moral purity, that the source of ‘evil’ in both the Sethian Apocryphon of John and Valentinianism (to cite just two examples) is a feminine principle. It is Sophia (‘Wisdom’) who initiates the degeneration of the emanations of being and disrupts the ‘serenity of the divine world’ (sometimes seen as a ‘household’) by a self-willed act of imaginative projection. Achamoth, offspring of Sophia, a personification of imperfect thinking, is also a feminine principle. In the Valentinian system it is Achamoth who creates the Demiurge, who, in ignorance of the supernal realms claims “I am the lord, and there is no one else…” (Isaiah 45:5). This utterance is as a sign of hubris – even though the demiurge is the Creator, he is still a degraded spiritual entity compared to the ultimate Good, the true God. The Devil, Cosmocrator of the World is created by the Demiurge.

Thus, we see how, by an indirect chain of emanations, the evil principle, the Devil, is a descendent of the only female principle in this patriarchal scheme so compatible with original Platonic thinking. Plato taught that evil men were reincarnated as women.

It is true that various categorisations of higher spiritual principles (such as Barbelo the mediating first-thought or self-image of the supreme entity) are pictured as androgynous – but one can be sure that such an idea simply confirmed the ‘heretical’ nature of these sects in the eyes of the orthodox. Nevertheless the general drift of all these mainly ascetic doctrines conforms to the overall pattern of salvation ideology, an ideology compelled by its own inner logic to assert the debased nature of the sensible world; for, if ‘the world’ is not ‘fallen’ there is no need of salvation.

The levels of emanation and complex strata of lower gods, angels and Aeons simply represent a more baroque variation on the original idea that the ‘real’ world is but a pale imitation (inferior or ‘fallen’) of a higher realm of pure perfection. The notion that evolution implies a continuing distance from the first principle of absolute purity implies that all subsequent phases, or changes, are more debased, more impure than previous phases. This is one of the main tenets of all authoritarian systems – the idea that change is always change for the worse, that tradition is preferable to innovation – one of the main rationales for the suppression of dissent in this particular kind of ideological framework.

This is why Sophia is seen as an ‘unruly’ element, a personification of cosmological perturbation, enemy of stability and harmonious authority. It is an interpretation serving the interests of a patriarchal caste horrified by the disruptive, truly anarchic (chaotic) potential of desire in general and female desire in particular.

At a more fundamental level these pre-orthodox, ‘heretical’ systems oscillate between the twin poles of temporality. Here we find, as one might expect, myths of the past and myths of the future. Myths of the past are creation myths, myths devised to explain or explore issues of origins, meaning and purpose, including the meaning and origin of evil. Myths of the future often derive from the universal notion of ‘deliverance’, sublimated (in the case of ‘Gnosticism’) via the Judaeo-Christian paradigm as the principle of Redemption or Salvation.

Insofar as the ‘gnostic’ beliefs outlined here fail to step beyond these parameters it is clear that the attribution of ‘revolutionary’ attitudes to so-called ‘gnostic’ believers is misleading, just as the notion that ‘Gnostics’ sought to invert interpretative traditions (‘value-reversal’) as a systematic programme of subversion is also misleading. Demiurgical interpretations of scripture represented specific attempts to deal with specific textual issues. These were issues well known as problematic and subject to continuous revision, analysis and scriptural surgery by many philosophers and theologians of the time. Of course, in many cases the church simply explained anomalies by allegory and parable, but others wrongly called ‘Gnostics’ invented alternative cosmologies using the familiar symbolic lexicon of Platonic philosophy in synthesis with Judaic myths and traditions assimilated into Christianity.

The origins and identities of the authors of the Nag Hammadi Codices will probably remain unknown. Behind these shadowy authors one should image a tangled web of complex theological speculation giving rise to multiple mythic innovations. The outcome of this process being the multiplicity of demiurgical interpretations found in the known sources. One thing, however, is quite certain: there was no distinct ‘religion’ or doctrine called ‘Gnosticism’ by its followers and there were no ‘spiritual anarchists’ in late antiquity.

 We can be sure that this idea is a symptom of modern anxiety or anomie, a product of twentieth century pessimism. ‘Gnosticism’ is a modern myth – the myth of a Religion That Never Was.

Select Bibliography

Carroll, Peter J. Liber Null and Psychonaut, Samuel Weiser, 1987

Howatson, M. C. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. OUP, 1997

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion. Beacon Press, 1958

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. Pelican Books, 1982

Plato. Timaeus. Penguin Books, 1965

Webb, James. The Flight From Reason. Macdonald, 1971

Williams, Michael Allen. Rethinking Gnosticism. Princeton University, 1996


Illustration:  The End Of Everything, 2000

 

Words From Nowhere

INTERVIEW WITH A C EVANS

Susan A. Duxbury-Hibbert

August-November 1996


You are known as both a writer and an artist. What is the starting point for a project, the drawings or writing?
This is quite a difficult question actually…ignoring external reasons for starting something (like being asked specifically for a poem, or specifically for a drawing) and concentrating purely on the creative viewpoint, one has to recognize the different ‘dynamics’ of different forms. Prose-versus-poetry, collage-versus-drawing. What is meant by a ‘starting point’? In the final analysis a starting point may not be a conscious thing - it’s an inspirational thing. Nevertheless there is sometimes a deliberate, definite, intention to work with visual rather than verbal methods/materials or vice versa, but the origins of the intention are non-rational. A starting point may be generated by idea-level interconnections between verbal and visual output, or continuous immersion in art-literature may prepare the ground for a ‘next step’.

When did you start drawing/writing?
I have childhood memories of drawing from sometime in the mid-1950s. My father had some artistic abilities and tended to encourage me - this was real juvenilia: pictures of soldiers and airplanes or whatever. Later on, about the age of 17 (in 1966) I suddenly started to get more serious about it. The trigger was finding the work of Aubrey Beardsley - the style and general tone of his work was quite an eye-opener...then I discovered Surrealism and started making collages.
Even as a kid I was quite a bibliomaniac, so any crossovers between art and literature interested me. The fact that Surrealism was not just to do with painting was very important. As the first Surrealists were poets, not artists, the whole movement plugged into, and extended, that nineteenth century avant-garde tradition of experimental writing (Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Mallarme-Jarry). This became more and more significant to me. So I got a typewriter for my 21st birthday and started writing: initially fiction (the obligatory, abortive novel and ‘decadent’ short stories) but eventually poetry, after doing some translations of Max Ernst and Messiaen lyrics.

What inspires you to start a new project?
Perhaps inspiration is the unforeseen consequence of immersion - immersion in materials, researches, Myths, influences, precursors. Perhaps, at a deeper level, it is some sort of psychosomatic urge, the result of unfocussed psychic pressure from the unconscious, a surge of neuronal energy, a perturbation of the psychic atmosphere, which finally crystallizes in words and images.
The titles of pictures are a sort of poetry. The collage process is internalized (psycho-montage/ psycho-cut-up) as well as externalized in the traditional Surrealist Ducassian Encounter of disparate material elements. Art emerges from the (al)chemistry of the creative process, through interaction with the prime materia, the massa confusa, of unrefined unconscious matter. Works feed on each other - collages and drawings can inspire poems and poems can inspire drawings. Drawings can evolve from the collage procedure. Works emerge in cycles and spates - groups of poems are somehow related to each other, sets of drawings share the same motifs and techniques.
Sometimes, of course, an external requirement will be the pretext for a project - but the non-rational, chance aleatoric factor must always be there. If a project is to ‘work’ it must be an active element in the transformation process. All art is transformation, the perpetual, unstoppable transformation of the day-to-day in which the mundane becomes the bizarre.

What part, in your opinion, does illustration play in adding to a text?
‘In The Beginning Was The Word’ someone said. Well, don’t believe it. Pictures are primal. The image in the mind’s eye precedes utterance, or, to quote Duke Ellington: ‘There’s always a mental picture’. I think there has to be a kind of synergy - a deep affinity - between any image and the words it is used with. This affinity may not be obvious or concrete. Chance encounters between poems and pictures in the editorial process can often give rise to effective associations.
In a different context one may think of texts illustrating images rather than vice versa. For example The Cascades was a set of poems written to ‘accompany’ some pictures by Rupert Loydell and, more recently, both Martin Duxbury-Hibbert and Norman Jope have collaborated by providing texts (Between Alien Worlds and Zones of Impulse) for sets of images provided in advance of literary composition. In these cases successful!
Illustration depends upon a feeling of ‘rightness’ or integration into the finished product. Equal value resides in both text and illustrations. Textual content can be derived from the images. Literal illustration is ok for factual and instructional situations but I am more interested in these more oblique relationships between words and images.

When did you start publishing your work?
I first started publishing drawings in about 1968 as greeting cards. Then I managed to get drawings
Into various occult magazines during the mid-1970s and also a few lit. crit. articles and reviews from
1980 onwards. My first poetry publication was in Stride Magazine, and Stride published the first
collection of poetry and drawings, Exosphere, in 1984

What artists have influenced you?
The earliest artistic influences I can remember were illustrators - Mervyn Peake (The Hunting of the Snark and other books), Tenniel’s Alice illustrations, Eric Fraser and Joan Kiddell-Monroe - again, this was when I was kid. I really liked fantastic things and, in the case of Frazer and Kiddell-Monroe, hard-edged linearist things. When you’re that young you don’t think about ideas like Abstraction, you react to the imagistic qualities of what you see because that’s the way the imagination is.
Another key influence was Japanese Art. We had some volumes of drawings by Hokusai, which I was always looking at. His work is very naturalistic but it can also be very macabre and grotesque and ultra-stylish. Remembering the period 1966-1970, when I was trying to find my way is very confusing - there were so many ‘influences’.
The closest I got to contemporary fine art or gallery art was Richard Hamilton’s reconstruction of Duchamp’s Bride which he did for a big Tate retrospective around July ‘66. The irony of Duchamp’s stance and the iconoclasm of Dada were very important - an antidote to the Peace ‘n’ Luv culture! But then again I was undoubtedly sympathetic to Psychedelia and Op as well.
I still like Sixties design and art movies like Performance - the influences were an intermedia hotchpotch: Art Nouveau Symbolists like Klimt, Jan Toorop and Khnopff. I like Odilon Redon, Hieronymous Bosch, Grunewald, Durer, William Blake and Goya…Aubrey Beardsley…Alfred Kubin. Also the assemblage sculptures of Louise Nevelson. There was a piece of hers in the Tate called ‘Gold Wall’ which was a stylized structure of abstract, rectilinear box-shapes and compartments encrusted with commonplace, ‘found’ objects such as old chair legs and wooden slats. The whole thing was painted a uniform all-over gold colour. There was a clash of materials in Nevelson’s work, which greatly appealed to me at the time.
It’s necessary to identify different types of influence. There are precursors who influence by style, there are those who influence content and there are those who influence by example. There are some whose influence is a combination of all these factors. This is partly why it is difficult to discuss influences. There is also the problem of ‘originality’. I think everyone is influenced by someone, although lots of artists and writers (in this country at least) think that admitting to influences is like some sort of confession of inadequacy. This is just as complicated with literary influences as it is with artistic ones.

So what about literary influences?
So far as literature is concerned I would have to mention the French tradition: Baudelaire, Mallarme and Antonin Artaud as a major influence in various ways, also Huysmans and Andre Breton. My Pre-formative reading was Science Fiction (mainly British), Fantasy, Horror (particularly Poe and Lovecraft) and all sorts of myths and legends. This established a continuing involvement with ‘popular’ genres that continues to the present.
As I said I’m a compulsive bibliomaniac and read all the time. It all goes into the creative process. The American Beats had quite an impact. Beat style was so un-English, so un-literary, or so it seamed at the time. I remember reading Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Burroughs’ Nova Express and being instantly converted to a more ‘modern’ attitude to writing.
Thinking back to the same period I would name the following ‘literary’ influences: Arthur Machen, Lermontov, Thomas Pynchon (especially), De Quincey, Alfred Jarry (Faustrol), Robert Graves (The White Goddess), De Sade, Gerard de Nerval, Boris Vian, Angela Carter, J.G Ballard, Nabokov (Ada), Barth (The Sotweed Factor), Borges, and Jean Genet.
There were various non-fiction/critical works that were significant I think. For example, Jung’s writing on Alchemy, The Romantic Agony, Marie Bonaparte’s psychoanalytic study of Poe, Masters and Houston’s Psychedelic Art, Robert Greer Cohn’s book on Mallarme, Hans Bellmer’s Anatomie de L‘Image, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Althea Hayter. A later influence was Samuel Beckett. His work, particularly the short prose and the novels (the Trilogy and How It Is) is a landmark in the imagination. Absolutely no one can afford to ignore Beckett. A combination of factors (including the influence of Austin Spare) induced me to read a lot of occult literature - but that’s another story....

Do you exhibit/ sell your artwork?
I participated in an exhibition called Cross Section in Chelmsford 1968 - but that was a one-off. I’ve never seen myself as a gallery artist or involved in the art market - it just isn’t my scene really. I see ‘originals’ as ‘masters’ for reproduction rather than traditional fine art artifacts. I’m not really geared up to do commissions and things like that. As I said - not really my scene.

What is your method of working?
Steve Sneyd has observed that the poetic act is like trying to snapshot the fragmentary immediacy of the brain’s workings and compared his methodology to ‘a trapped animal’s gnawing of it’s own leg....’. In a sense he is right about this. It is difficult to cultivate the self-awareness and objectivity needed to comment on the methodology of the creative process beyond surface characteristics.
In writing I was influenced by the minimalism of Poe who criticized the viability of the long poem - I don’t write long poems in the sense that Spenser’s Faerie Queene, or Paradise Lost are long poems. So minimalism, even miniaturism, is intrinsic to my method in many respects. Also the Postmodernist blurring of boundaries, perhaps inspired by Borges idea of 'ficciones' - cerebral, laconic, hermetic, labyrinthine, enigmatic - these are often some of the qualities I look for in a sphere where the essential differences between poetry and prose are unclear.
The poetic methodology is most elusive, Often I find myself working with a surreal psycho-montage of wordflow, sometimes incorporating ‘found words’ or cut-ups or phrases that simply emerge from the unconscious (Words from Nowhere). I regard many of my ‘poems’ as borderland texts, neither prose nor poetry. There is a narcissistic ‘working up’ of drafts and an element of faction where quasi-autobiographical or historical research material merges with pure fantasy. I reject traditional prosody as the technique of a dead era.

What about drawing methods? How do you go about obtaining the final image? Do you have a clear idea at the outset, or do you do many variations?
Drawing methods are varied. Often I will work from a store of sketches and notes for visual ideas, which I keep. These are usually pencil sketches but can be ink drawings and doodles as well. Sometimes a drawing can be spontaneous and committed to paper right away. Sketches may be quite expressionistic and unformed to begin with but then go through a number of different of versions and stylisations.
Areas of detail in Rapidograph drawings are done directly onto the final drawing in most cases. These are usually detailed areas of stippling and fine-point decoration, a sort of amalgam of Moreau’s encrustation, Beardsley’s stipple technique, Seurat-like textures and Ernstian decalcomania-like textures. This sort of work can be very time consuming. In many cases compositions are derived from pre-existing collages. Sometimes I use ‘found images’ derived from, say, newspaper photographs or magazines. Sometimes there is a pre-existing mental image and it’s like taking a snapshot. In many drawings there is a deliberate use of ‘negative space’ in the composition - space derived from the chance lines of the pen or pencil.

How necessary is it to you that you are published & ‘known’? Would you continue to write/draw if you had no public outlet?
I am reminded of a section in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider - he was quoting T. E. Lawrence (Wilson saw Lawrence as an archetypal ‘outsider’ figure) who said that a craving for the power of self-expression was the most decisive driving force in his life. This craving is the only antidote to the nihilism of our age. Without this craving for self-expression there is nothing, literally, Nothing.
Artistic creativity is the way to achieve maximum self-expression. This is an end in itself but the craving is capable of transformation – self-expression becomes individuation, individuation becomes self-initiation. An infinite process of self-initiation, a sort of Aesthetic Gnosticism perhaps. In this context publication is irrelevant. On the other hand creative editorializing can become part of The Work. Working with Stride and Memes and other magazines has lead to unforeseen creative activity through interaction, publication itself becoming part of a wider transformation process.

Do you conceive of a contemporary context, or do you feel you are working in isolation?
Well, I do conceive of a contemporary context - I also feel I’m quite isolated in what I do as well! I’ve always been interested in what you might call cultural history - the evolution of aesthetic and religious ideas, so this sense of history helps me to try to define my own contemporary context.
On the other hand my interaction with immediate contemporaries is rather limited these days and I find a lot of SP type poetry and stuff rather alienating. It’s always difficult to name names but, if pressed, I might cite Steve Sneyd, Robert Shepherd, lain Sinclair, Norman Jope, Rupert Loydell and Martin Duxbury-Hibbert as current writers who may overlap with some of my own concerns.
My original sense of contemporary context was shaped by a sort of ‘post-everything’ feeling. It seemed to me that the transition from Surrealism to Postmodernism via Pop, Situationism, Psychedelia, Neo-Dada and Op from 1966-1971 was the beginning of some sort of end - an End with a capital ‘E’, in fact. As Hassan said about Postmodernism: it ‘dramatizes its lack of faith in art even as it produces new works.’
The truth is that, in this era of ‘post-everything’ and loss of faith, one didn’t really look among one’s own generation for a contemporary context. Except, perhaps, in semi-commercial fantasy art, Psychedelia and satire (Roger Dean, Bruce Pennington, Wes Wilson, Michael English, Scarfe, Steadman), one looked to the survivors of the avant garde who were still with us. In the visual arts this meant Duchamp, Chirico, Ernst, Bellmer, Leonor Fini, Matta, Burra and Francis Bacon. I think my graphic style was very influenced by Bellmer - he must be one of the greatest draughtsmen of the twentieth century. In literature there was Andre Breton, Borges, Ballard, Angela Carter, David Gascoyne, Beckett and William Burroughs. One was conscious that they were all still around producing new works. They were the contemporary context for me.
Yet, throughout the period the sense of an ending was exacerbated by the deaths of nearly all these major figures. Breton died in 1966 around the same time as the last major International Surrealist Exhibition (‘Absolute Divergence’). He was followed by Duchamp in 1968, Bellmer in 1975, Ernst and Burra in 1976, Chirico in 1978 and, finally, J. L. Borges in 1986. By the time you got to 1976 we were into the ‘break up of Britain’, The Winter of Discontent and the New Dark Age of the ‘Enterprise Culture’…one tried to build on the previous era.


Illustration: One Gothic Night, 2000