A Journey to the Bottom of a Rabbit Hole (Interlude #3)

Rosslyn Chapel - window on north side. Photo credit ©: Rob Farrow.
(All images in this post can be clicked-on for original size.)

"The building of cathedrals was part of a colossal and cleverly devised plan which permitted the existence of entirely free philosophical and psychological schools in the rude, absurd, cruel, superstitious, bigoted and scholastic Middle Ages. These schools have left us an immense heritage, almost all of which we have already wasted without understanding its meaning and value."

- A quote attributed to P.D. Ouspensky. sourced from Tim Wallace Murphy's Enigma of the Freemasons: Their History and Mystical Connections (2006). Inset right is a column from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, featuring the Kabbalistic Tree of Life symbol.

"The Gothic cathedral, that sanctuary of tradition, science and Art, should not be regarded as a work dedicated solely to the glory of Christianity, but rather as a vast concretion of ideas, of tendencies, of popular beliefs, a perfect whole to which we can refer without fear, whenever we would penetrate the religious, secular, philosophic or social thoughts of our ancestors."

- Another quote sourced from Murphy's book which originated from Le Mystère des Cathédrales (1926) by a mysterious French alchemist known only as "Fulcanelli." Inset left is another - more enigmatic - column from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

From Chartres Cathedral in France: a mechanized astrological clock added in 1528.

***

What's this? A third Interlude?

Alas, yes. As you may have guessed, I've been tottering on the brink of one rabbit hole or another for months now, so, I suppose it was inevitable I'd lose my footing eventually. Originally, I intended to add 2 quotes I found recently (now posted above) to the Chinese Sewing Basket addendum - in which I mention Notre Dame de Paris - and, for all sensible reasons, that's where the operation should've ended.

But, no. Instead, I decided to Google the French alchemist Fulcanelli (who wrote the second quote above)... a man I was unfamiliar with. After all, a writer should know her subject matter, right?

Famous Last Words. For, at that very moment, although unbeknownst to myself, a massive black rabbit hole was silently opening directly beneath my feet like the mouth of a terrestrial Moby Dick.

Maybe it's the topic itself: alchemy - specifically hermeticism - the black hole of the esoteric world. The further you go, the less you know. And, as for Fulcanelli... ah, yes, Fulcanelli, now there's a name to conjure with. And, certainly many have. For some he's the man-who-never-was with an ongoing archive of potential identities (see the Fr. Wiki entry).

But, ultimately, this post isn't about Fulcanelli any more than it's about cathedrals. As it so happened, while ferreting out info about Fulcanelli I discovered his friend, Julien Champagne, also a French alchemist and an artist. It was he who created the frontispiece emblem (inset left) for Fulcanelli's Mystère des Cathédrales.

(Continued below the jump...)

The Language of the Birds (& the Memory of Sound): Automatism

Wings of Light - oil on canvas - 1984, Roberto Matta

"Fulcanelli's main point, the key to unraveling the larger mystery of alchemy and the cathedrals, lies in an understanding of what he calls the "phonetic law" of the "spoken cabala," or the "Language of the Birds."

"What unsuspected marvels we should find, if we knew how to dissect words, to strip them of their barks and liberate the spirit, the divine light, which is within," Fulcanelli writes. He claims that in our day this is the natural language of the outsiders, the outlaws and heretics at the fringes of society.

It was also the "green language" of the Freemasons ("All the Initiates expressed themselves in cant," Fulcanelli reminds us) who built the art gothique of the cathedrals. Ultimately the "art cot," or the "art of light," is derived from the Language of the Birds, which seems to be a sort of Ur-language taught by both Jesus and the ancients. It is also mentioned in the Sufi text, entitled "The Conference of the Birds," by Attar the Chemist."

- excerpt from Reading the Green Language of Light  by Vincent Bridges

"Whilst some artists emphasised automatism’s role in discovering hidden aspects of the artist’s psyche, others, such as Roberto Matta, valued it as a means for uncovering hidden aspects of objects and for the exploration of what lies beyond the confines of the visible world. Its optical image is just one aspect of the existence of an object. Galaxies, crystals and living matter go through processes of creation, existence and destruction. They exist in time, change with the passage of time and can be observed from multiple perspectives. Conventionally, however, they are only depicted at a fixed point in their history, from a single point in space and, inevitably, with a palette limited to colours which reflect light of a visible wavelength.

To his attempts to use automatism to give form to those things which cannot be seen except as an inner vision, Matta gave the name ‘psychological morphology’, a phrase Colquhoun used to describe her paintings of the 1940s.  For the painters involved in this theorising – primarily Matta, Esteban Frances and Gordon Onslow-Ford – the possibilities were, literally, endless; ‘It is a Hell-Paradise where all is possible’ wrote Onslow-Ford. He continued; ‘The details of the farthest star can be as apparent as those of your hand.  Objects can be extended in time so that the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly can be observed at a glance."

- excerpt from Richard Shillitoe's excellent online article: Occult Surrealist: Ithell Colquhoun and automatism

"We are still living under the rule of logic, that, of course, is what I am driving at. But in our day, logical procedures are only applicable in solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism still in fashion only allows us to consider facts directly related to our own experience. The aims of logic, in contrast, escape us. Pointless to add that our very experience finds itself limited. It paces about in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to free it. It leans, it too, on immediate utility, and is guarded by common sense. Under the flag of civilisation, accompanied by the pretext of progress, we have managed to banish from the spirit everything that might rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, fancy, forbidding any kind of research into the truth which does not conform to accepted practice. It was by pure chance, it seems, that a part of our mental world, and to my mind the most important, with which we pretended to be no longer concerned, was recently brought back to light."

- excerpt from Andre Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto

***

M'onde - oil on canvas - 1989, Roberto Matta

(Continuing where I left off), have you ever come across a particular scene (via a movie or some other form of entertainment)... which goes something like this: a man is walking down a city street shouting oaths to an invisible entity, and the passersby think he's mad... deranged,* but, in reality, the invisible entity actually exists - the man really is communicating with someone or something - and the passersby are merely missing the overall picture (?). If it isn't already, it ought to be the standard metaphor for all creatures "paranormal". Ghosts, aliens, fairies, Yeti, whatever. Some of us see them, some of us don't. The ones who do are immediately labeled delusional... while the ones who don't - for the most part - file their nails and sit complacently on their sofas, in the safety of a bedroom or living room or media room, watching bogus "reality" shows on whatever pixelated screens they possess. But, meanwhile, there's an elephant in that room. Or, maybe a bird. A wild bird which has flown into the room and has begun plummeting against the walls in panic and desperation. And, because no one knows quite what to do - and the program is over anyway - they wander into another room and close the door.

End of metaphor.

Artists, on the other hand, stay in that room... with the elephant... with the bird... with no pixelated screens to distract them. That is, unless they're a certain breed of digital artist, but, at this point, the screen is blank, apart from maybe a shadow of a large ear, or dim trails from a flapping wing, or the bright glints of light on a splintered beak. Images from the unconscious are hard to pin down. They're anomalies in a different language... poetry in unspoken words. You might say, (re: quote above) an unspoken cabala, the true language of the birds... and, invisible birds, at that.