Strange Journey, Strange Travellers

It is with some misgivings that I present to a sceptical audience this unlikely report obtained by dubious methods from an undisclosed source. It must be said at once that no independent evidence can be found to confirm the existence of the EOU and exhaustive research has failed to disclose any trace of a similar organisation operating at that time. Furthermore, as the substance of the report is so far-fetched, if not reprehensible, the likelihood that the cautious reader may feel it to be an example of a literary hoax must be very high. Alternatively, the less charitable will simply dismiss the entire farrago as crazy delusion masquerading as outrageous fact. Even so, it may be admitted that our anonymous redactor has deployed a not inconsiderable accumulation of telling details to bolster an otherwise flimsy survey, imparting an air of plausibility if not verisimilitude to the proceedings. Finally, I might mention the inclusion of an article ‘Gnostic Alchemy of the Imagination’ in Nox: A Magazine of the Abyss No 1 (1986) – but this, of course, proves nothing.

Dedicated to the ‘exorcism of illusion’ the Esoteric Order of the Ultrasphere (EOU) provides an intriguing footnote to the occult history of Britain in the late nineteen seventies.

Founded around 1979 by Comus Klingsor and Astrodamus Niger, the Order of the Ultrasphere appears to have been based upon an ideology of anti-mystical aesthetic nihilism. Although sharing some features with modern occultism of the Crowley-Spare-Typhonian variety, a close inspection of the ‘Ultrasphere Manuscripts’ leads to the conclusion that the philosophy of the organisation represented a return to the dark-side of the Enlightenment era.

A fixation with Sturm und Drang, anti-clericalism, libertinism and with the noir Gothic themes of the late eighteenth century ensured that the artistic practices and aesthetic ideas of Klingsor and Niger were rooted in the world of Goya and Sade. They sought to continue the dark, pessimistic tradition that links those artists, via Baudelaire and Lautreamont, with the incendiary actor-poet Antonin Artaud and some other Surrealists. Rimbaud’s Lettres du Voyant are a recurring point of reference in the manuscripts.

One must accept that the origins of the OU will remain forever shrouded in the deepest mystery. The earliest document that has survived is the first letter of a small collection of correspondence known as The Colchester Papers. Addressed to a recipient known simply as ‘NQNQ’, the letter proposes a future grimoire of ‘new demons’ with mildly ludicrous names based on typing errors (‘Ogdogon’, ‘Dawneophyte’, ‘Occultor’ and ‘Desiravle’ among others). Also, the writer (Klingsor) claims affinity with the Black Brothers (‘defectors/challengers of all belief systems – of belief systems as such’) and calls for the Grand Oeuvre (Great Work) to be aligned with the notion of self-initiation, claiming there are ‘no true gurus, teachers or spirit guides’.

In the second letter (Third Thoughts) a system of seven degrees of attainment is outlined but takes the form of an anti-image or mirror image of the traditional cabalistic scheme derived from the Golden Dawn and other mainstream societies. This mirror image of occult attainment arises from the application of the Formula of Reversion – a key concept of the Ultrasphere, just as the mirror was a key symbol. The author says: ‘Mirrors and reflections, images of the anti-verse, anti-matter, black holes…’ The term ‘anti-verse’ may refer to a literary as well as to a cosmological theme.

In another letter with the title Notes Written on Trains, Klingsor demands the construction of ‘new system of magic’ to oppose ‘the black magic of the world theocratic power elite’ who use faith as ‘a mechanism for draining the energy of the masses.’ The new magic of the Ultrasphere will be ‘materialistic, anti-abstractionist, non-mystical…the magic of the shamans v the magic of the priests.’ In this text (under the formula Reality = 0) Klingsor summarises the OU worldview thus: ‘in politics – Anarchism, in morality – Nihilism, in science Relativity, in art – Dadaism, in space – Black Holes.’ 

These documents date from 1979 (the year of The Postmodern Condition and the year the Voyager probes reached Jupiter), but in the archives of the Ultrasphere are numerous other artefacts and images, many of them of obscure date, many dated earlier than the Colchester correspondence. Colchester was often referred to by its Roman name Camulodunum and ‘NQNQ’ may be the same person listed on the membership register as Frater Camulodunumensis.

Illustration VII from a set of images titled Codex Archon (1976) carries the title ‘Ultrasphere (Apocalypse)’ there are two other images from the same year, one called ‘Archon Of The Ultrasphere (The Sacrament)’, and another called ‘Life For Art’s Sake (Initiates of the Ultrasphere)’. The first picture is a pencil drawing; the others are photomontages (collages) in the style of the Surrealists or earlier Dada artists like Hanna Hoech and John Heartfield.

The earliest reference to the mythos of the Ultrasphere in the collection is a different image, this time dating from 1975 and called The ‘Archon of Goth’, another photo-montage showing a volcanic seascape and a demonic figure identified by the artist as the ancient god Set. This quasi-mythology of Archons is clearly derived from certain interpretations of Gnosticism, while the appearance of the god Set may reflect a Typhonian influence. Elsewhere Klingsor and Niger refer to a ‘Gnostic alchemy of the imagination’.

The Ultrasphere Manuscripts comprise four sub-collections. Three collections of holograph manuscripts and a small set of typescripts (photocopied) comprising the Colchester Papers, the letters to NQNQ already mentioned. There are replies from NQNQ, but not collected here.

The three collections of hand-written holographs are numbered and titled Primary Papers of the Ultrasphere (15 documents), Supplementary Papers of the Ultrasphere (10 documents) and a final group of 8 documents called Rearguard Aesthetic. This final collection seems to comprise a set of notes for some kind of artistic manifesto – an unrealised programme for ‘Ultraspheric Art’ in conflict with both the traditional canons of high culture and the official avant-garde..

The bulk of these documents consist of hastily scrawled notes and tabulations, a very few are fragments of continuous text. Separate from the documents are a number of occult illustrations or diagrams intended to visualise various tenets and themes of the system or in some cases to operate as Liberation Symbols or pictorial fetishes. These illustrations may have been intended to form part of a larger, synthesised text or grimoire.

In the papers there is reference to another text or project, Codex Sardonicus: Existence in Theory and Practice (1976-1979), predating the Order, but which Klingsor and Niger used as a point of reference, the basis of their anti-method of ‘attainment’. This was the core of the system, usually referred to as the Axis Mundi (or ‘Axis of the Ultrasphere’) – kind of ‘world-tree’ or central, axial structure that functioned, like the well-known cabalistic diagram, as an ontological framework. But, as described, the Axis was a reversion, or inversion, of usual expectations: it was a katabasis or descent, not an ‘ascension’ model of ‘higher’ attainment. The initiate of the Ultrasphere was expected to navigate downwards, to plumb the depths of his/her own personal hell, or unconscious. The ironical collage ‘Life For Art’s Sake’ shows a group of dandified initiates in the guise of eighteenth century dilettantes in a kind of submarine art gallery full of curious works – above them, on the surface, is the Sadean universe of Terra (terror); the ‘world’ as we know it.

Considerations of space preclude detailed exposition of the theoretical occultism of the OU. A summary of the various topics covered in the Primary and Supplementary papers will, however, provide a glimpse of the range and scope of the collection.

The first three Primary Papers deal with the Paths and Keys of the Axis Mundi. The fourth paper sets out a version of the Grades of attainment. The fifth paper is a list of projects and recommended authors (Auctores Damnati) whose works form the Books of Vital Doctrine or Diamond Dogmas. All these documents date from 1979.

The titles of the rest of this set are as follows: Infinite Initiation, Psychoanalysis, Anxiety, Nihilism, Initiatory Cycle, Fiat Lurks, Magia Innaturalis, Bardo Cartography, Beyond Rebirth and Initiation: The Ultimate Myth.  Paper XI (Fiat Lurks) deals with the macro-history of initiation including such topics as the ‘collapse of tradition’, infinite self-creation and the ‘rupture of the normal’. Magia Innaturalis (Paper XII) talks of ‘radical disengagement’ and introduces various art-historical concerns because ‘cultural evolution reflects the initiatory process’, although, according to Third Thoughts, the ‘object of the exercise’ remains ‘the infinite transfiguration of the self’.

The Supplementary Papers of the Ultrasphere recapitulate similar themes and ideas. The First two Supplements return to the topic of self-initiation. Initiation I is called ‘Unio Mentalis’, Initiation II is called ‘The Sanctum of the Art’. There follow three items of continuous text dealing with blood symbolism (with reference to some quotations from Artaud), death doctrines and the theme of Atavistic Resurgence (this item blatantly assimilated from the New Sexuality of Austin Osman Spare). Another paper Bestial Atavisms attempts to interpret various Symbolist paintings as images of the atavistic phenomenon. The last four papers in this group are titled as follows: Invasion/Obsession, Great Year of Renovation (rough notes on occult macro-history), Springboard to the Aethyrs and Transmutation of the Real. The term ‘aethyrs’ implies a familiarity with Crowley’s The Vision and The Voice and, therefore the ‘angelic’ scryings or workings of Dee and Kelly.

Separate from these manuscripts is another document in a different hand headed Known Members of the Order 1979-1981. There are nine names listed, all of which are ‘magical’ pseudonyms. It should be borne in mind that the nomenclature is deliberately ‘absurd’ in the ‘pataphysical’ spirit of Alfred Jarry. These include NQNQ; Nyktikorax, the Night Raven; Chryse Planitia, Mistress of the Cathedrals; Rodrigo Terra; Imbroglio Korgasmus; Sarchasmus Caesaromagus; Citrus Zest the Whore of Babylon; Comus Klingsor (707z); Frater Retrogradior and Ponerologicus Astrodamus Niger.

It appears that these alleged members of the EOU assigned extravagant titles to each other. For instance one was known as the Purple Legate of the Third Degree Below Zero (zero is the symbol of psychic death or nirvana), another, the Supreme Pontiff d’Estrudo and yet another, Cardinal of the Oversoul (the ‘Autarch’, the ultimate level of self-transfiguration, or initiation, in the Ultrasphere).

There is also an enigmatic note referring to ‘inner plane adepts’ of special interest or importance to the Order. One, a semi-legendary figure named Curion Orphee le Deranger, was thought of as a kind of wandering ‘Cagliostro’ figure and composer of wild musical works, and the other, the very sinister Archon of Othona, was also known as ‘Lord of the Dark Face’. Othona is the old Roman name for modern Bradwell, a fort on the Saxon Shore. The Essex towns of Colchester (Camulodonum) and Chelmsford (Caesaromagus) are linked with Bradwell in a kind of psycho-geographic affinity. Unfortunately, no further explanations are given.

One is left with the notion that the OU was an attempt to formulate a kind of nihilistic counterpart to the psychedelia of the preceding decade, an eclectic ‘counter mythology of inner space’ using the Axis grade system as a framework. Primary Paper IV is a fragmentary list of the grades, ranging from Grade Double Zero (Student) through Grade Zero (Mendicant) to Supreme Pontiff (Beyond the Abyss) and Magus Maximus or Autarch. These grades or levels are restated in the fourth letter of the Colchester Papers: Kinx Om Pox (1980) where each level is associated with a key attribution. For example the Mendicant is associated with the key of Fear/Hate, The Retreatant with Disgust, the Preceptor (Purple Legate) with Cynicism and the Magus Maximus with Autarchy, the infinite transfiguration of the self. Each grade key of the Axis was represented by its own particular Sigil or Liberation Symbol and every key was linked by one of the twenty-two paths mapping out the ‘Strange Journey’ of the initiate.

Here is a quotation from Primary Paper VI Infinite Initiation (Unio Innaturalis):

‘No one has time for politics. Nothing is psychotic. Initiation is total – infinite, the infinite totality of the cosmos in microcosm. The infinite totality of the microcosm writ large in the macrocosm. Each grade creates his own universe, his/her own myth, each grade is creator of his/her own dream…’

There is a lost poem by Comus Klingsor and an illustrative collage picture (still extant in the archive) with the title ‘Strange Journey, Strange Travellers’ – a very strange journey indeed.

Illus: Ultima II, 1979
Illus: Strange Journey, Strange Travellers, 1976

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

 

Always Bizarre

THE AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATION OF PERCEPTION

The aesthetic transformation of perception is closely linked to the purification and transmutation of language: the alchimie du verbe of which Rimbaud and the Surrealists spoke.

The transformation of perception arises from the disclosure of the Essential, the revelation of the Quintessence, and from the elimination of all inessentials, all deadly serious prosaic elements.

Cautionary tales? Not today, thank you. Weighty Issues? Oh yeah? Huge Challenges? You must be joking. The revolution? Oh, I say! The People? Oh ha ha. Devotional tracts? Give us a break.

It is this ‘alchemical’ or Hermetic theory of poetic language and aesthetic image, to which Mallarme was alluding when he referred to the task of giving ‘a purer meaning to the words of the tribe’ and which lay behind Baju’s desire to re-designate the Decadents as the ‘Quintessents’. In this sense the poet can become a shamanistic custodian of the modern – or the traditions which comprise the modern, for traditions enshrine ways of seeing the world and, contrary to popular belief, are never static, mutating in response to deep-running, impersonal, evolutionary currents. In this sense the ‘visionary’ role of the poet, uniquely attuned to these mutations, is not metaphorical – he, or she, may become the instrument of change – change, through transformation of perception.

In his seminal Lettres du Voyant Rimbaud defined the visionary role of the poet of the future as ‘the supreme savant’, the initiator of universal transmutation, the harbinger of a new era in human evolution, un multiplicateur de progres.

 

The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in the universal soul in his own time. He would produce more than the formulation of his thought or the measurement of his march towards progress.

 

Poetry, like all art, should be founded on a special vision of the world, a different way of seeing, even a new reality principle. To a degree any artist will transgress accepted ideas of normality, if only by presenting familiar objects and situations in an unusual way. Poetry is bound to conflict with consensus opinion because the special vision will incorporate the negative as well as the positive; it will be an indictment as well as an affirmation. As Sartre once said ‘literature is, in essence, heresy’. When an artist – a poet, a novelist, a composer, or an artist in any medium – adopts a different way of seeing the world he or she has taken the first step towards total idiosyncratic vision attained through various stages of initiation. This ‘initiation’ or rite of passage will involve a state known as ‘the dark night of the soul’ in which enhanced awareness of ‘supernal’ perfection, the Ideal, or, to use Mallarme’s phrase, ‘the dream in its ideal nakedness’, leads to a similarly enhanced awareness of human, existential imperfection and a breakdown of the mystified and petrified realities of the everyday social world. For Baudelaire awareness of human or worldly imperfection was called spleen, for the alchemists it was the Nigredo or ‘blackening’. Celine used the term noircissement to identify the same state of mind – a night-world of horror, viciousness, pain and dread. It is this ‘core of horror’ which, since the eighteenth century, has given rise to a current of militant pessimism in modern art and literature, represented by the works of Sade , Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Nietzsche, Jarry, Artaud, Genet, Burroughs and Beckett, among others. Here one may think of that ‘nocturnal language’ of which Anais Nin once spoke regarding the writings of Anna Kavan – that lexicon of dreams and alienation.

It is of some historical significance that this nihilistic vision is closely linked to the emergence of new stylistic trends. Most of the authors and poets in this current of development contributed to a revolution in syntax and to the deconstruction of traditional conventions. Barriers between fact and fiction, between spoken and written language, between poetry and prose, have been dismantled in order to express a vision of transmutation – in order to effect a transmutation. This disruption of syntax, literary form, musical tonality and pictorial representation is symptomatic of the dissociation and psychic dislocation brought about by the first stage of initiation. For many it has become a metaphor of cultural collapse, of the rejection of the telos, of the atomization of the world – a break-down, not a break-through.

In addition to the ultra-nhilist vision there is a second way of seeing which, like the first, was derived mainly from Baudelaire: modernity.

Many of Baudelaire’s followers regarded themselves as more modern than their contemporaries, despite their frequent denunciations of modern beliefs. Although they loathed modern society, they admired modern technol­ogy because they regarded the artificial as superior to the natural. This was reinforced by an adherence to Naturalism, a concentration on the depiction of ‘slices’ of modern (urban) life, a challenge to the taboo of ‘morality’. This Naturalism complemented a need to cultivate intensity despite all social limitations: indulgence in perversity could be masked as Naturalistic research or ‘field work’. For Huysmans, the most powerful of the Naturalist writers, such methods offered some way of coming to terms with the otherwise banal exigencies of everyday life. His transition from Naturalism to Decadence, from Downstream to Against Nature, represented a need to augment dry Naturalistic description with some ‘deeper’ more acute vision, even though his subsequent transition from Decadence to Catholicism, from Against Nature to La Cathedrale, represented a retreat into a comfort zone of ‘faith’. The traumatic identity crisis caused by the arrival of modernity; the erosion of hitherto established cultural norms, the feelings of isolation, of powerlessness and meaningless self-estrangement, can often lead to a resurgence of, or relapse into, religion (the ‘flight into faith’). This is a circumstance which can apply to both the individual (such as Huysmans in this case) and to the collectivity as a whole.

In most of his critical writings from 1845 Baudelaire, inspired by Poe and Gautier, advocated the theory of ‘the heroism of modern life’. He argued that the artist must oppose the false charm of nostalgia by extracting the essence of beauty from the everyday world – to look for the ‘classic’ in the remote was an error. In her discussion of his aesthetics in her biography of Baudelaire Enid Starkie wrote: ‘Thus all forms of modernity were capable and worthy of becoming classic, and if they did not do so the fault lay with the artist and not with his age.’ The implication of this view, its implicit relativism, and the doubt it casts on orthodox definitions of the real, renders ‘the heroism of modern life’ a disruptive, perhaps magical, idea.

From the alchemical perspective, if the essent­ial beauty of the everyday is equated with the philosopher’s stone, Baudelaire’s theory corresponds to the ancient Hermetic doctrine that the ultimate substance must be distilled from a despised and neglected prima materia. Thus, Rimbaud and Verlaine, in London in 1873, sought the marvelous and the fantastic in immediate urban images, in ‘modern-Babylonian’ architecture, in The City, in station hotels, in the docks and great iron railway bridges.

This potent urban psycho-geography prefigures the Surrealist poet Aragon, who in 1924, wrote of those other places, ‘sites... not yet inhabited by a divinity’, but where a ‘profound religion is very gradually taking shape’ as though surreality precipitates ‘like acid-gnawed metal at the bottom of a glass’. For the Surrealists these privileged locations were in Paris: the Pont des Suicides at the Buttes-Chaumont, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Tour Saint-Jacques, or the vanished Passage de l’Opera. For us London may take the aspect of a modern Babylon, of a ‘concrete jungle’, redolent with psychic portents and hermetic symbols. Like St Giles High Street, Hungerford Bridge has always possessed features associated with Gateways to Otherness, where – to use Questing jargon – the ‘veil between this world and the next is particularly thin’.

As the filmmaker Georges Franju once remarked ‘Doesn’t this mean that poetry is in reality… and that it is less a question of expressing it than of not preventing it from showing itself?’ And so the poet becomes a shaman of multiple dimensions, creating the classic from the mundane, distilling the essential from the inessential, revealing ‘heroic’, interpenetrating parallel realities, or, to use Franju’s terminology, to allow the insolite (unusual) to emerge beside or in-between the interstices of the accepted Real.

But, in order to experience, or even portray the ‘heroism’ of modernity the poet must unlearn preconditioned responses and engage in a critical, initiatory process of dissociation. August Weidmann has shown how this process of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ was a key tenet of Romanticism and fundamental to modern conceptions of art. The Romantics however, tried to gain access to a ‘primordial vision’, whereas it can now be understood that deviation from conventional perceptual norms is, in fact, a way of transmuting the world around us.

In his struggle to apprehend Poe’s ‘supernal beauty’ filtering fitfully through profane sensory mechanisms, the poet uses his or her art to deconstruct, or dismantle, a preconditioned worldview.  Under­standing of ecstasy, or The Ideal, generates a blackening, or noircissement, as the horror of existence overwhelms the subject with disgust, inducing a hellish night-world experience. However, this dissociation brings a more fantastic, if not more positive, vision – the everyday world loses its narrow, constricted frame of limitation and becomes, thankfully, bizarre.

The artist-poet, through an aloofness or detachment, fleetingly attained in reaction to the disgust provoked by the Nigredo or unregenerate night-world state, perceives that, divorced from everyday functions or assoc­iations, ordinary situations, objects, even people, may take on a surreal perspective as words and images function as ‘so many springboards for the mind’ (Andre Breton). They acquire an ephemeral, but nevertheless quintessential, glamour, or enchant­ment of absolute Beauty. But, it will be seen that this ‘absolute’ Beauty, this ‘threshold aestheticism’, is a coniunctio oppositorum, a union of opposites in the Hermetic sense. It contains not only the essential ‘gold’ of supernal beauty, but also a fearful purity of supernal horror – it is not only Naturalistic, but anti-Naturalistic – it is not only soothing but a force which consumes with a unique intensity: it is ‘subversive of perception and understanding’. It is not only sublime; it is also of The Abyss. It is not some transcendental enlightenment, but more a much sought-for diversion from the banality of the mundane or even ‘the appearance of the image of liberation’ to cite Marcuse.

It partakes of both elegance and the grotesque. “If I am not grotesque,” said Aubrey Beardsley, that most perfect example of the aesthetic sensibility, “I am nothing”.

Beauty, said Baudelaire, is always bizarre.

A revised version of an article first published in Chaos International No 15 March 1993

Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy Website

Illustration: Aethyr of Le Voyant, 1979

Aratron

This Spirit teacheth unto you the Creation of the Souls of Men, and what they really are; as also their estate after Death. When you cause these Spirits (under Aratron) to come unto you, see that you remain not long in their company. They will also tell you by writing, that which you desire no know.


The Grimoire of Armadel (trans Mathers)

Illustration: Aratron II, 1981