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In his 1924 manifesto, Breton also included what
he felt to
be the definite and tracable history of surrealism and magical art in
the work
of certain
artists and
visionaries, many of whom were obscure then. I
will
also define my reference to magic by defining magician as someone who
can use
the
arts of
illusion and staged phenomenae to induce an audience to
believe to
be not only true, but highly so, no matter how outrageous their
Cartesian
credibility
is. He must have th patience and process-consciousness of
the
alchemist.We relate here to alchemy in the following context: any
manifestation
on a physical
plane of unconsciouss, or divine processes. Alfred Jarry,
the
French writer referred to the science of pataphysics as the laws
and
equations
which describe or govern the astral level, or as he put
it on one
occasion, "the surface tension of God".
With the Age of Aquarius beginning, we find
attention
shifting to the image of the sun. The general condition of mankind is
to become
peaceful and
benevolent.
But even if this is not true or evident, those
who have
reflected on the Egyptian sense of time and phenomena to the Hopi's
time
system,
will realize
that is they themselves who are already embodying
these
manifestations. True, there are many hangovers from the last era: wars,
racism,
pollution,
etc., but they are just that
:"hangovers",
which must clear up as the day continues. Perhaps ritual will resume
its
rightful place as the proper
outlet for
aggressive tendencies. In this case, the artist who is involved in the
processes I have mentioned, is the likely person to help in describing
the
form
of these rituals. There will also be a coming awareness of the true
descent of
Western culture from Atlantis. The truth of the
Sufi
teachings will
enable Western
man to recover his true spiritual
heritage and
just as the Eastern modes of learning have come to light, so will there
be a
re-learning
of the real
Western myths.
Artaud realized that Western man must be able to
re-live his
passage in terms of Western archetypes and attempted to show them in
his plays.
Eastern, or any other myth
senses, have
inestimable value as teaching aids, but serve no real emotive or
personal value
to Western man compared
with his own
archetypal allegories. Likewise, Greek mythology is at best an
interesting
study, but survives mainly as literature. Although Greek logic
and
science,
etc. did invade Europe through Rome, the inherent magic of that era is
gone. The
one exception is the Tuatha Danaan tribe who migrated
from Greece to
Ireland
where they became a legendary Celtic fairy clan. This places them in
touch with other aspects of Celtic myth
lore, the King
Arthur legends
and Druidic mysteries, which Robert
Graves
describes in The White Goddess. In
that book, he relates that the lore of the British Isles
was spread by
the
minstrels. This, then, brings us to the fountainhead of Western
learning, the
Sufis.
Through their influence, the tradition of the
troubadours
spread through Spain and southern France with the Saracens and
eventually led
to the
tradition of
"romance". Going back even further, we find the
existence of the divine arts and sciences from Atlantis preserved in
ancient
Persia
and Egypt.
Here were developed the various practices and beliefs
which
eventually found their way into Europe: alchemy, freemasonary,
Rosicucianism,
minstrelsery and such institutions as the Knights Templar and the Order
of the
Garter. These did not fare too well when they
encountered the Hebrew-Christian theologies, the 'official'
Bible myths being a distraction for the student of magic that often the
true Christian
mystics are
overlooked by him.
It is an interesting fact that many Christian esoterics from Assisi to
Jacob
Boehme were actually indoctrinates of
the Sufis.
This also applies to
many scientists
and scholars such as Roger Bacon;. from there the tradition largely
went into
the arts.
In art, music and literature, the traditions of
Sufism and
magic lay beneath the surface until some 19th century French artists
uncovered
them.
These artists,
who are by no coincidence, the spiritual
predecessors of
the Surrealists, saw as evidence around them, and in the wisdom of
their
imaginations,
the traditions stemming from Arabia. The most mysterious inheritors
were the
Gypsies, with their Tarot cards, fortune telling and
intoxicated
rituals. They
parallel so closely the Sufi Dervishes who used mushrooms and hashish
to
prolong their unusual 'whirling', that the
influence is
unmistakable.
There is
also the phenomenon of the Basque region near the French-Spanish
border, which
because of its strange and
customs which
relate to no other in Europe,
is
thought by many scholars to be a last remnant of Atlantis.
One artist who perhaps best personified those
tendencies was
Maurice Ravel. A Basque by birth, he spent hours of labour over his
immaculate
compositions
in order to express what he felt was the effect of the
Arab
pollination of Europe. Although rarely, or never mentioned with regard
to the
Surrealists, he was, in fact, a favourite of such magician-painters as
Magritte
and Ernst, who obviously saw the hallucinatory and anti-gravity
effects
of such
compositions as "Alborada del Gracioso" or "Une Barque sur
l'Ocean". To a lesser degree perhaps, Claude Debussy also translated
the
tradition into his work, but it seems he was more pre-occupied with the
Norman-Celtic myth sense that he had in common with writers like
Maeterlinck
and Mallarmé. The other composer who was, with the first two,
referred to as
'Orientalists' at the time was Erik satie. A Rosicrucian
for a time,
Satie's
delicacy reminds one of a Persian tableaux, or a Moorish garden at
night.
Comparable examples in painting would be people
like
Delacroix, Gustave Moreau, Douanier Rousseau and Odilon Redon. Then
there were
the
other
Symbolists, the writers. This would include men like Gautier,
Baudelaire and the Club des Hashiciens, Rimbaud, Huysmans and many
more.
Perhaps the
most outstanding and easily the most outrageous of these
was the
meta-magician and poet/playwright,
Alfred Jarry. Jarry actually
embodied in
his everyday life and attire
the
most extravagant and hyper-real of his
hashish and absinthe (later ether) hallucinations to the degree
that it
consumed him at an early age. His life made it possible, however, for
the
Surrealists, through the poet Appolinaire to appear.
By the end of the First War and after the
convulsion of
Dada, it was high time for a gigantic flowering of all this accumulated
knowledge to erupt
in the
intoxicating, and intoxicated atmosphere of
Surrealism. It was by this time pretty well agreed that the
Mediterranean was
the seat of
Western magic.
Even Picasso eventually moved there to be
closer to
his inherent mythologies. Dali never ceased to speak of his Catalonia.
Miro
lives on Majorca Giorgio de Chirico was a Mediterranean by birth. Paul
Klee
resolved himself as a painter after a trip to Morocco.
The last note was sounded by Antonin Artaud, who
symbolized
the apocalyptic end of the first phase of the reinvestigation of
magical
art.
Through the
hysterical and acute
vision of his madness, he saw these and other possibilities for Western
man's
salvation. Artaud even traveled
to Mexico to
take peyote with the
Indians and
learn their god and myths. Trying to assemble the trans-Atlantis
antediluvian
myth sense himself,
apparently
proved too much for his already unstable
mind.
As he said himself, "In Mexico, while climbing a mountain with my
guides,
I was
bewitched by
an agent of the International Dark Forces". This
also
seems to have been the case for the Surrealist painter and inventor of
the
decalcomania
technique, Oscar Dominguez. A native of the Canary
Islands, which
we know to been a portion of lost Atlantis, Dominguez'
untimely
suicide
in 1958 shows the strain on those who endeavour to
investigate the true myths.
Max Ernst seems to have survived intact, however.
Announcing
at one time that he had been reborn at the end of World War One as a
young
man seeking
the myths of his time, he managed to get through with his life. For
reasons of
survival, similar to Ernst's, the magic artists have again
gone
underground,
there they lie, in psuedo-burial, waiting to take their rightful place
as the
people's magicians.
Gregg Simpson
1970