JEAN DELVILLE TIMELINE

1867 (January 19):  Jean Delville was born in Louvain, Belgium.

1879:  Delville enrolled in the evening classes at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts.

1886:  Delville made his first trip to Paris, where he met the esoteric masters Papus and Péladan, and the occult novelist Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.

1887:  Delville had his first exhibition, with the art group L’Essor.

1887–1888:  Delville was introduced to Martinism by Papus.

1890:  Delville became a member of Kumris, which was an art salon and an occult circle at the same time.

1892:  Delville left L’Essor and created the salons Pour l’Art.

1893:  Delville published his first book, Les Horizons hantés.

1892–1894:  Delville participated in the first four Salons Rose+Croix.

1895:  Delville established a salon for an “Idealist art,” in Brussels.

1895:  Delville received the Belgian Prix de Rome for painting.

1897:  Delville painted his first masterpiece, The School of Plato.

1897:  Delville published Le Frisson du Sphinx.

1899:  Delville became a member of the Theosophical Society, Belgian section.

1900:  Delville published The New Mission of Art.

1903:  Delville was initiated into Freemasonry at the lodge Les Amis Philanthropes (Grand Orient of Brussels).

1900–1907:  Delville painted his masterpieces The God-Man, Love of Souls, and Prometheus.

1914–1918:  Delville lived in exile in London, where he became Worshipful Master of the King Albert lodge of Freemasonry.

1925–1925:  Delville was very active as a propagandist for Krishnamurti in Belgium.

1930:  Delville broke with the Theosophical Society; met Émilie Leclercq.

1931–1947:  Having left his family, Delville set in Mons (Belgium) with Émilie Leclercq.

1931–1944:  In Mons, Delville lived several years of heightened artistic activity, with his palette now tinged by the Art Deco style.

1937:  Delville ended his long career as an academic and professor at the Belgian Academy of Fine Arts.

1942:  Delville wrote his libretto for an opera, Zanoni, le Rose+Croix, with ten drawings.

1947:  Delville completed his painting Vision de la paix, his esoteric testament.

1947:  Delville separated from Émilie Leclercq and returned to his family home.

1953 (January 19):  Delville passed away on the very day of his eighty-sixth birthday in the Forest municipality of Brussels, Belgium.

BIOGRAPHY

Asked about Jean Delville (1867-1953), [Image at right] many contemporary Belgians would simply answer: “Delville, never heard of him!” However, when paintings such as the Portrait of Madame Stuart Merrill (now at the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts), The School of Plato (at Paris’ Musée d’Orsay), or The Love of Souls (at the Museum of Ixelles, Brussels), are mentioned, many would recognize them as iconic symbolist works. His works survive, and position Delville among the great symbolist painters. But Delville the man has disappeared and his works, in a way, have been taken hostage by critics in such a way as to make their author invisible. In part, Delville himself is to blame: a brilliant artist and intellectual, but difficult in person, he was known to practice “the delicate art of making enemies.” His family and descendants also shoulder some of the blame, having fashioned a sanitized, official version of his tumultuous life, which cared little for his esoteric inclinations and glossed over him leaving his family at the age of sixty-seven to live with a young student, Émilie Leclercq (1904-1992).

Delville’s life and career are strongly marked by his esoteric interests as a Theosophist, Martinist, and Freemason. He was born in Louvain, Belgium, on January 19, 1867. His family subsidized his evening classes at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts, where he got his diploma in 1887. He led a charmed life, having by the tender age of twenty produced such masterpieces as L’Homme aux corbeaux, recently rediscovered in the dusty archives of the Belgian Royal Library [Image at right]. Still in his youth, he collaborated with L’Essor, one of the best-known art salons in Belgium. In 1892, he established in Brussels his own salon, Pour l’Art, followed in 1895 by a new salon, devoted to what he called “Idealist art.” In the same year 1895, he won the prestigious Prix de Rome in the category of painting. In 1897, he produced his first masterpiece, The School of Plato [Image at right]. He also published books, both of esoteric poetry and about art, starting with Les Horizons hantés in 1893 (Delville 1893) and Le Frisson du Sphinx in 1897 (Delville 1897), and culminating in 1900 with The New Mission of Art (Delville 1900), published with a preface by the famous Theosophist Édouard Schuré (1841-1929) and translated into English in 1910 (Delville 1910).

Meanwhile, Delville had rapidly found himself drawn towards occultism. After a trip to Paris in 1886, where he had also met the symbolist writer Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838-1889), whose interests for the occult were well-known, he started meeting frequently with the famous esoteric author Papus (Gérard Encausse, 1865-1916). Papus would go on to found modern Martinism, before befriending the no-less celebrated Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918), Papus’ associate and later rival in the revival of Rosicrucianism. Péladan would introduce Delville to his Salons Rose+Croix, establishing a privileged relationship from the outset, with the Belgian more the disciple of the French esoteric master than his collaborator. Delville managed to maintain a good relation with both Papus and Péladan even after the two French esoteric leaders became bitter rivals, and in 1890 became amember of Kumris (or Kvmris), the Belgian branch of Papus’ French Groupe indépendant d’études ésotériques, and an organization that was an art salon and an occult circle at the same time.

Esotericism and aestheticism constantly overlapped in the work and private life of Delville [Image at right]. Having become “Superior Unknown,” the highest degree among the Martinists, Delville would also attain the highest distinctions in Freemasonry, where he had been initiated in 1903, becoming Worshipful Master of two prestigious lodges: King Albert in London, during the First World War, and Les Amis Philanthropes in Brussels, during the 1920s. Yet, Delville was above all a Theosophist, a cause for which he would push himself to the edge.

All of Delville’s paintings (as well as his many poems), including his masterpieces painted between1900 and 1907, such as The God-Man, Love of Souls [Image at right], and Prometheus, were inspired by the occult, from his artistic subjects to the form, colors and symbols he used. Symbolism in general combined aesthetics and esotericism, particularly in France and Belgium. Jean Delville became one of its main representatives, along with the other Belgian symbolists, such as Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) and Félicien Rops (1833-1898), and the French painters, particularly influenced by Theosophy and Schuré, known as the Nabis.

Without any shadow of a doubt, the period of 1890-1914 constituted the most fruitful time of Delville’s artistic career. The First World War inspired some notable patriotic works, although they are seen today as being fairly kitsch. The painter had joined the Theosophical Society in 1899, quickly becoming its main leader in Belgium. The post-war period, until the start of the 1930s, saw Delville dropping his paintbrushes and mobilizing his body and soul for the young Indian Brahmin Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), chosen by the Theosophical Society as the World Teacher, the “New Christ,” and groomed as such. The intellectually brilliant and highly cultivated Delville would dedicate himself fully to this improbable cause, through books, journals, articles and conferences (Delville 1913; 1925; 1928) [Image at right]. This would go on until Krishnamurti reached adulthood and disavowed his role in 1929, by declaring that he was neither the World Teacher nor a new Christ. For Delville, this marked a defeat, depression, and rupture.

As this rupture, which led to Delville’s separation from the Theosophical Society in 1930, was unfolding, the painter met Émilie Leclercq, one of his students at the Academy of Fine Arts. They soon started a relationship that was to last fifteen years. The painter left his family and went to live with Émilie in Mons, Belgium. Before meeting Leclercq, Delville was dominant, a leader, a chief. With Émilie [Image at right], he entered a fresh phase of total isolation in Mons. Delville was no longer a member of any society, and apart from his continuing work as a teacher at the Belgian Academy of Fine Arts and as an art critic, he mostly focused on rebuilding himself.

It is understandable that Delville’s family would give his “Mons years” such a negative appraisal. “Nothing good would come” from them, as his son Olivier put it in the work he dedicated to his father (O. Delville 1984:43). In fact, the Mons period was a highly artistically productive one, with Delville showing extraordinary vitality in the period between his seventieth and eightieth birthdays.

He was vivacious as a professor and lecturer for the Academy of Fine Arts. Seventeen of his twenty-three lectures, all published in the Academy’s bulletins, were written in Mons. As a painter, he also remained very active, rediscovering his creativity and producing some inspired Art Deco works, which today come as a surprise for those who know Delville when they learn of them, only because they were so neglected. In Mons [Image at right], Delville would produce several masterpieces in terms of the talent imbued in them and their scope, particularly the superb Roue du Monde, which is the property of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, although unfortunately preserved in its reserve rather than displayed. As a citizen, too, he showed vivaciousness as a resistant against the occupying German forces, releasing deliberately contrarian works under the Nazis’ very noses.

In Mons, Delville would also write a sort of libretto for an opera: Zanoni, le Rose+Croix, which was based on the Rosicrucian novel by the British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873). It was previously thought to have been written by the artist in the early twentieth century, since the initial idea dated to this period; however, it was in fact completed in Mons. This important work consists of a long explicatory note of the author’s esoteric motives, a manuscript of 150 pages, and ten drawings that constituted part of the designs for a theatrical presentation of the work (see Frongia 1984; Guéguen 2016, 2017). It was also in Mons that Delville would write a sort of catalogue raisonné of his work (with a photo album filled with shots taken under very difficult conditions during the war) with the intention of eventually publishing a more complete edition. In this task, he was assisted by the young René Harvent (1925-2004), who would become a renowned sculptor. Harvent observed Delville’s paintings in his workshop every day and took notes. In 1944, he watched him painting his famous Portrait of Madame Stuart Merrill, which the official biographies of Delville, as well as the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts, date back to 1892. Not so, claimed Harvent: it was painted in front of him in 1944 (note in the René Harvent archive, reproduced in Guéguen 2016:214).

In 1947, Delville separated from Émilie Leclercq and returned to his family home in Brussels. In the same year, he completed his lastgreat work, Vision de la paix, a highly symbolic painting that can be considered his esoteric testament [Image at right]. Delville passed away on January 19, 1953, on the day of his eighty-sixth birthday in the Forest municipality of Brussels, Belgium.

The greatest exhibitions of Delville’ works, featuring most of his masterpieces [Image at right], were organized in the twenty-first century (Laoureux 2014; Larvová 2015). A true academic study of Derville also started fairly recently (see Cole 2015), particularly with respect to his connections with Theosophy and esotericism (Clerbois 2012; Gautier 2011; Gautier 2012; Introvigne 2014; Guéguen 2016, 2017). Further studies on Delville the poet, Delville the musician, and Delville the art critic would hopefully follow.

IMAGES**
**All images are clickable links to enlarged representations.

Image #1: Henri van Haelen (1876-1944), Portrait of Jean Delville, 1925. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Image #2: Jean Delville, L’Homme aux corbeaux (Man with Crows), 1888. Charcoal drawing. Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels.

Image #3: Jean Delville, L’École de Platon, 1897. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Image #4: Jean Delville, L’Homme-Dieu (The God-Man) 1901-1903. Oil on canvas. Groeninge Museum, Bruges.

Image #5: Jean Delville, L’Amour des âmes (Love of Souls), 1900. Tempera and gouache on canvas. Ixelles Museum. Brussels.

Image #6: Jean Delville, Krishnamurti. Ink on paper. 1929.

Image #7: Émilie Leclerq, Portrait de Jean Delville, 1940.

Image #8: Jean Delville, Vision de la paix. 1947. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Image #9: Jean Delville, Prometheus, 1907. Oil on canvas. Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels.

REFERENCES

Clerbois Sébastien. 2012. L’Ésotérisme et Le Symbolisme Belge. Antwerp: Éditions Pandora.

Cole Brendan. 2015. Jean Delville: Art between Nature and the Absolute. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Delville, Jean. 1928. Krishnamurti, révélateur des temps nouveaux. Brussels: Imprimerie de l’Office de Publicité.

Delville, Jean. 1925. La Grande Hiérarchie Occulte et la Venue d’un Instructeur Mondial. Brussels: Les Presses Tilbury.

Delville, Jean. 1913. Le Christ reviendra. Le Christ Futur en Face de L’Église et de la science. Paris: Les Éditions Théosophiques.

Delville, Jean. 1910. The New Mission of Art: A Study of Idealism in Art. Translated by Francis Colmer. London: Francis Griffiths.

Delville, Jean. 1900. La Mission de l’Art. Étude d’Esthétique Idéaliste. Brussels: G. Balat.

Delville, Jean. 1897. Le Frisson du Sphinx. Brussels: H. Lamertin.

Delville, Jean. 1893. Les Horizons Hantés. Brussels: P. Lacomblez.

Delville Olivier. 1984. Jean Delville, Peintre 1867-1953. Brussels. Éditions Laconti.

Frongia, Maria Luisa. 1984. “I Bozzetti di Jean Delville per Le Scene del Dramma Lirico Inedito Zanoni. ” Storia dell’arte 51: 137-51.

Gautier, Flaurette. 2012. “Jean Delville et L’occulture Fin de Siècle.” Master II Dissertation. Tours: Université François Rabelais.

Gautier, Flaurette. 2011. “L’Écriture Artiste de Jean Delville (1888-1900).” Master Dissertation. Tours: Université François Rabelais.

Guéguen Daniel. 2017. Jean Delville: The True Story . English Edition. Paris: Éditions Liénart.

Guéguen, Daniel. 2016. Jean Delville. La Contre-Histoir. Paris: Éditions Liénart.

Introvigne Massimo. 2014. “Zöllner’s Knot: Theosophy, Jean Delville (1867-1953), and the Fourth Dimension.” Theosophical History 17:84-118.

Laoureux, Denis, ed. 2014. Jean Delville (1867–1953), Maître de L’idéal. Paris: Somogy and Namur: Musée Felicien-Rops.

Larvová, Hana, ed. 2015. Jean Delville 1867-1953. Prague: Prague City Gallery and Namur: Musée Félicien Rops.

Post Date:
5 April 2017

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ TIMELINE

1946 (November 30): Marina Abramović was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (present-day Serbia).

1965: Abramović began her studies at the Academy of Visual Arts in Belgrade. She also read esoteric literature, in particular by H.P. Blavatsky, and books by Mircea Eliade.

1974: Abramović performed Rhythm 5 (originally The Star of Fire) in the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade.

1975: Abramović met the German artist Ulay, with whom she lived and worked until 1988. In their art, the couple explored inter alia alchemical ideas about the hermaphrodite.

1980/1981: Abramović and Ulay spent six months in the Australian outback, meeting local Aborigines.

1981: Abramović and Ulay started their year-long series of performances titled Nightsea Crossing, in which they expressed their interest in “perennial wisdom” as the common esoteric core of different spiritual and religious traditions.

1988: Abramović and Ulay ended their relationship. Abramović started producing Transitory objects with crystals and magnets, whose stated purpose was to help her audience to reach a “higher level of consciousness.”

1990: Abramović started her teaching career (1990-2004) at different art academies in Europe. She organized her Cleaning the House student workshops, based on exercises inspired by G.I. Gurdjieff, the Buddhist vipassana meditation, and other spiritual traditions.

2010: Abramović performed The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She sat in a chair for two and a half months, inviting the public to sit across her and engage in telepathic conversation.

2012: Abramović presented in Milan her first version of The Abramović Method, a syncretic system of exercises aimed at spiritual development.

2012/13: Abramović went on a “spiritual journey” in Brazil. She met spiritual “surgeon” and Spiritualist medium John of God, who transmitted to her a mysterious “current” to help her “raise human consciousness through art.”

2014: Abramović performed 512 Hours. During the sixty-four-day-long performance, she tried to generate a “current” with the audience through different exercises.

2015: Abramović started her “world tour” teaching The Abramović Method, presenting it in São Paulo, Sydney, and Athens.

2016: During the American presidential campaign, Abramović unexpectedly became the target of conspiracy theories claiming she was a Satanist.

2016: Abramović published her autobiographical book, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir.

BIOGRAPHY

Marina Abramović (b. 1946) [Image at right] is one of the international pioneers of performance and body art. Her work has often been interpreted through political and feminist lenses, while the influence of Western esotericism has not been properly discussed. However, from the very beginning, Abramović’s art has been significantly affected by the New Age and other contemporary “alternative” spiritualities. In the period of her joint work with German artist Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, b. 1943), these esoteric pursuits became even more prominent. Later in her career, she came to present her performance art, which increasingly included the participation of the public, as a kind of spiritual practice. Eventually, she developed The Abramović Method, a syncretic mind-body-spirit training program for her followers, which drew on different sources such as New Age, the Armenian esoteric master George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866?-1949), vipassana meditation, Brazilian Spiritualism, and others.

Abramović was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (present-day Serbia), on November 30, 1946, in a family of the Communist elite. She spent her early childhood outside her parents’ house with her maternal grandmother, who was a believer of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The brother of her grandmother’s husband, Bishop Varnava Rosić (1880-1937), had been the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church between 1930 and 1937. In the literature about Abramović, including in texts written by the artist herself, it has been claimed that her great-uncle Varnava had been canonized as a saint by the Serbian Orthodox Church (Abramović 2004:36; Stiles 2008:42; Richards 2010:42), but the information is not correct. Đurić-Mišina (2009) does not mention a canonization in his extensive biography of Patriarch Varnava. I contacted Đurić-Mišina, and he confirmed that Varnava, an important figure in the history of the Serbian Orthodox Church, was neither beatified nor canonized. Abramović is not interested at all in Christianity and the Serbian Orthodox Church, but she seems to be fascinated by the idea that a member of her family had been a distinguished spiritual leader.

During her student years (1965-1970), Abramović was involved in what might be termed the Yugoslav counterculture movement. In 1968, she took part in student protests, inspired by the ideas of the New Left, but soon became disillusioned with politics. On the other hand, like many of her peers, Abramović was quite enthusiastic about what Gordan Djurdjevic called the “occult boom” in the Yugoslavia of the 1970s (Djurdjevic 2013:80). Due to her mother’s political influence in cultural circles, Marina Abramović and her brother Velimir Abramović (b. 1952), who is today a popular New Age author in Serbia, had access to the home libraries of Belgrade intellectuals, who owned important books and magazines on esotericism published in pre-socialist Yugoslavia. There were also newly published titles on the subject, like the various handbooks of occultism written by the “hermeticist” esoteric author Živorad Mihajlović Slavinski (b. 1937) (Djurdjevic 2013: 84-91). As her biographer notes, Abramović was also fascinated by the writings of the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), and of the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) (Westcott 2010:41-42).

When it came to art, Abramović was very impressed by German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), a member of the Anthroposophical Society, and his idea of the artist as “shaman” and “healer” of the society. When Beuys, already famous at that time, visited Belgrade in 1974 to give lectures during the art manifestation III April Meetings in the Student Cultural Center (SKC), the young Abramović “made sure to spendas much time with him as she could” (Stokić 2014). On the other hand, many New Left-oriented Yugoslav students were not at all delighted with the “preacher-shaman” Beuys and his blend of “spirituality” and Marxism (Denegri 1996:199; Lončarić 1974).

Beuys was in the audience when Abramović performed her famous Rhythm 5, initially titled The Star of Fire (Jurčić 1974; Postolović 1974), during the III April Meetings in the SKC [Image at right]. Abramović doused with gasoline and lit a big wooden construction in the shape of what was easily recognized as the petokraka (“five-pointed star of Socialism ” in Serbian), a symbol of the regime. Abramović cut her hair, finger and toe nails, and threw them into the fire. Then she laid down in the blazing star, thus evoking the famous drawing of a man inscribed in a pentagram, from the book by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) De occulta philosophia (1533). Finally, she lost consciousness due to the lack of oxygen, and was saved from the flames by her colleagues.

In an interview given shortly after this performance, Abramović explained to a journalist that the shape of petokraka “corresponds to a human, because it has five points as a human does.” She also said that she was using “elements of ritual magic” (Jurčić 1974). Abramović’s biographer reports that she preferred to think of petokraka as “the pentagram of the occult” (Westcott 2010:82). Interestingly, a similar identification of petokraka with the pentagram appeared in Slavinski’s The Psychological Study of Magic (1972), republished as The Keys of Psychic Magic (1973). Slavinski, who drew on the teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (Djurdjevic 2013:85-86), described in his book what he called The Ritual of Pentagram or Petokraka, where he instructed his readers to visualize a big petokraka burning with the “blue flame of blazing spirit” (Slavinski 1973:125).

Abramović used the symbol of pentagram more explicitly in her Thomas Lips (1975), performed in the Krinzinger Gallery in Innsbruck, Austria. [Image at right] The performance started with the “Eucharist,” in which she sat naked at a table, ate one jar of honey, and drank one bottle of red wine. Then she drew on the wall an inverted pentagram around the photography of Thomas Lips, a young Swiss man she wanted to seduce (Stokić 2008:42-44), cut the same inverted pentagram on her belly with a razor-blade, flagellated herself until she started to bleed, and finally “crucified” herself on a cross made of ice blocks.

In a number of English texts on Abramović, the star symbol used both in Rhythm 5 and Thomas Lips has been exclusively interpreted as the petokraka, i.e. the five-pointed star of Socialism, and its use as a “critique of Socialism’s oppressions” (Richards 2010:12). However, Yugoslavian press clippings from that time reveal that most of the young art critics were very positive in their reviews of Rhythm 5 (Jurčić 1974; Postolović 1974), and the Young Communist League of Yugoslavia (SKOJ) even bestowed an art prize to Abramović for her performance (n.a. 1975). Another wrong claim that we find in a certain literature about Abramović in English is that her flagellation and pain-enduring performances derived from the Serbian Orthodox Christian tradition (Stokić 2010:25; Biesenbach 2010:16). These claims represent an uninformed and uncritical re-interpretation of Abramović’s own narratives, mostly used for “selling” her in the West as an art product from the Balkans with both intriguing “Communist” and “Orthodox Christian” overtones (on Abramović’s “Balkanization,” see Avgita 2012).

In fact, Abramović’s usage of Christian symbols and liturgical elements is more likely to draw inspiration from the esoteric literature, including Slavinski’s The Keys of Psychic Magic. Slavinski wrote about the two powerful magical symbols, the cross and the pentagram or petokraka, and both were present in Thomas Lips. Slavinski also warned his readers not to identify the cross with Christianity, because it was used as a powerful symbol in magic since the times of the ancient Egypt, more than 4,000 years ago, long before Jesus Christ (Slavinski 1973:30). Abramović, thus, used the symbols of the cross and the pentagram or petokraka in a performance that had nothing to do with Christianity, Orthodox or else. Thomas Lips was dedicated to a young man she wanted to seduce by means of something that could well be described as ritual magic.

In 1975, Abramović met the German artist Ulay, with whom she would live and work until 1988. Before he met Abramović, Ulay had been making self-portraits dressed as half man and half woman, i.e. as a Hermaphrodite, as the title of one of his photographs from 1973 suggested. After the two artists fell in love, they continued to explore the idea of the hermaphrodite in their joint work. The fact that both had their birthdays on the same day (November 30) contributed to their esoteric belief that they represented in fact one perfect being made of two opposing principles, male and female. They explored the alchemical idea of the hermaphrodite in a series of performances in which they ran towards each other and collided at high speed (Relation in Space 1976), or spent hours with their long hairs tied together (Relation in Time 1977). [Image at right] In one interview from that time, Abramović said: “I feel the perfect human being is a hermaphrodite, because it’s half man, half woman, yet it’s a complete universe” (Kontova 1978:43).

In 1980/1981, the two artists spent six months in the Australian outback. They encountered local Aborigines, which revived Abramović’s old fascination with Eliade’s descriptions of shamans and their rituals. In this period, the couple also submitted to hypnosis, studied Buddhism, and visited India to participate in vipassana meditation retreats. Their spiritual omnivorism was reflected in a series of twenty-two performances called Nightsea Crossing (1981-1987), organized in different museums around the world. Performances lasted between one and sixteen days, during the working hours of the museums, and were sometimes very demanding physically. For example, Abramović and Ulay would sit motionless at the opposite ends of a table, just looking at each other. To gain better access to the special kind of esoteric knowledge they were hoping to obtain through these performances, Abramović and Ulay abstained from food, which sometimes affected their health, especially Ulay’s.

The couple claimed that Nightsea Crossing was the outcome of their initiation in Australian Aboriginal wisdom. However, what they were doing was very similar to techniques used in vipassana meditation. The title itself referred to the idea of the “Nachtmeerfahrt” used by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) to explain the process of diving into the unconscious, the “night sea” (Kuhlman 2009:148). In one version of the Nightsea Crossing, titled Conjunction, the two artists invited one Australian Aborigine and one Tibetan lama, whom they considered to be the representatives of the non-Western esoteric knowledge of telepathy and extrasensory perception (Baas and Jacob 2004:188), to sit with them around a big circular table covered with gold. The title of this performance alluded to the alchemical notion of coniunctio oppositorum, the union of the opposites, as described by Jung in his book Mysterium Coniunctionis (Schloen 2006:224). Jung wrote that in alchemy coniunctio was usually expressed in dualistic terms (e.g male-female), and later also as quaternio, or the union between four elements, sometimes represented as “sitting” around a circular table (Jung 1971 [1955]:23). In Abramović’s and Ulay’s Conjunction, everything indicated the importance of the number four. Four people were sitting around the table, whose diameter was four meters, and which was visibly made from four parts (and was later also exhibited divided in parts); the performance lasted four days, each day for four hours. Conjunction could be considered as the outcome of Abramović’s and Ulay’s typical New Age fascination with perennial wisdom, or the search for an alleged common esoteric core of different religious and spiritual systems: shamanism, Buddhism, alchemy, esoteric Jungian psychology, and so on.

After the breakup with Ulay in 1988, Abramović continued her career as a solo performance artist. Walking in the steps of Beuys, she increasingly came to present her art as a kind of spiritual teaching and practice that would eventually transform society, a “social sculpture.” After visiting the Australian Aborigines, Brazilian shamans, different Asian cultures and vipassana retreats (which she preferred to call “monasteries”), Abramović considered herself initiated in the perennial wisdom of the non-Western traditions. In one interview, she said: “I see myself as a bridge going to the East to get the knowledge and going to the West to transmit it in the form of performance. People don’t go to the temples anymore. They go to the museums. And to me performance can be a great tool to create some kind of platform for that kind of experience” (Abramović 2008:25).

Abramović’s first attempt to present her art as a platform for spiritual experience was by inviting her public to “perform” by using her Transitory Objects. These furniture-like objects, which she has been producing since 1988, are usually made by using crystals, copper, or magnets, materials which, according to Abramović, emanate an “energy” capable of healing or spiritually transforming the user. Abramović invites her public to sit, stand or lie on the exhibited Transitory Objects, eyes closed, without moving, in a way similar to what is done in vipassana meditation [Image at right]. According to Abramović, the purpose of her Transitory objects is to help her followers in their spiritual development. When humanity would reach the sought-for spiritual transformation, no objects would be necessary, and that is why she calls them “transitory.” Abramović presents her work with the Transitory objects only as the first phase in the spiritual evolution of her audience. The final goal is to reach the “higher level of consciousness” that will enable the audience to receive the thoughts and “energy” directly from her, by means of telepathy (Art Meets Science 2013).

During her teaching career at different art academies in Europe (1990-2004), Abramović used to organize special workshops with her students, called Cleaning the House. The house was a metaphor for the body, which, according to Abramović, needed to be clean(s)ed before a student might engage in any serious artistic activity. However, the final goal of these workshops was not purely artistic. Abramović made several selected students “attempt ectoplasmic emission” while sitting and looking in each other’s eyes, without moving or talking for long periods of time (Drinkall 2005:227). Cleaning the House workshops included Abramović and her students not eating and not talking for five or more days, while engaging in various physical and mental exercises. Some exercises were clearly inspired by G.I. Gurdjieff, or the “great Russian teacher,” as Abramović called him. In her Stop with Mirror Exercise, which echoes the famous Stop Exercise created by Gurdjieff, Abramović would unpredictably put a mirror in front of a student’s face. The student’s effort was not to change the facial expression in that moment.

Abramović also introduced some exercises she learned during her retreats in India, such as the Slow Motion exercise, where students were instructed to move as slowly as possible while performing their everyday activities. In another exercise, Counting the Rice, students were given piles of uncooked rice mixed with lentils, with an assignment to separate the grains and count them, which usually took several hours [Image at right].

During her retrospective at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Abramović first tried to present her art as a form of telepathy, in a performance called The Artist is Present (2010). She announced she would sit silently on a chair for two and a half months, six days a week, from the opening to the closing of the museum. The audience was invited to sit one by one on an empty chair across Abramović and engage in a non-verbal communication with her. Abramović’s performance attracted more than half a million people, and the show became the most visited exhibition of contemporary art in the world that year (The Art Newspaper 2011). For a certain number of visitors, this experience of sitting and engaging in a mutual gaze with Abramović had a cathartic effect: they cried and started behaving very emotionally. All the 1,545 sitters were photographed by the Italian photographer Marco Anelli, and their portraits were immediately published online. However, faces of people that cried especially attracted the public attention, and Abramović soon became a global art celebrity who was supposed to possess the healing power of “mind reading.”

After the enormous success of The Artist is Present, Abramović decided that the time had come for her to devise her own method of teaching spirituality through performance. She called it simply The Abramović Method. The goal of The Abramović Method is personal growth, or “working on oneself” by means of performing different exercises. This echoes esoteric masters such as Anthroposophy’s Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), or Gurdjieff, and their methods of training. The Abramović Method has gone through many changes during the years. However, the main purpose seems to have remained the same: it is the physical and spiritual healing of contemporary Western people, who lack time to be in the present moment and get in touch with their Inner, or Higher, Selves.

The Abramović Method was significantly influenced by the artist’s encounters with different mediums, shamans and healers in Brazil in 2012/2013. One of the most important teachers Abramović met there was “John of God” (João de Deus, João Teixeira de Faria, b. 1942), a popular spiritual “surgeon” and spiritist medium. As described in her Brazil Journal (Abramović 2014:73-100), and also in a documentary, The Space in Between: Marina Abramović and Brazil (2016), Abramović assisted John of God during several of his controversial “visible surgeries,” performed with a kitchen knife and without anesthesia. [Image at right] In addition to the “visible surgeries” there are also “invisible surgeries,” which are believed to occur with the help of a mysterious “current” that flows through John of God’s healing center while patients sit and meditate. This “current” is supposedly channeled by John of God and other mediums (Rocha 2017). Abramović was most probably accepted in the circle of mediums that were allowed to help John of God in his surgeries and mission. In her Brazil Journal, Abramović claimed that John of God transmitted to her the “energy” to help her “raise human consciousness through art” (Abramović 2014:77). She was also awarded one of the special armchairs near John of God’s “throne,” among other mediums who were there “to channel energy” (Abramović 2014:78).

In 2014, after she returned from Brazil, Abramović organized her next performance in London, titled 512 Hours. During the sixty-four days of the exhibition, she and a few of her trained assistants were present in the gallery, from morning until evening, supposedly generating the mysterious “current” through their contacts with the audience, as it was announced in the catalogue of the performance (O’Brien 2014:16). Abramović and her assistants gently whispered to every visitor to close their eyes, and to “be in the present,” while they were leading them by the hand in the gallery and instructing them what to do next Abramović and her assistants also laid their hands “reiki-like” on the visitors’ backs [Image at right], as if they were manipulating some kind of “energy.” The activities at the exhibition were not the same during the sixty-four days, as Abramović experimented to find out which of the exercises produced more “energy” there. Some of these exercises were later incorporated in new versions of The Abramović Method presented in São Paolo (2015), Sydney (2015), and Athens (2016). In these new versions of her Method, Abramović also introduced some of the exercises from the Cleaning the House student workshop mentioned before.

The Abramović Method is still constantly changing. It is a work in progress. In its essence, it is a typical contemporary New Age workshop for “changing the consciousness” and “working on oneself,” presented in the context of performance art. For Marina Abramović, performance is not just a form of contemporary art done by an artist: it is a practice suited for all those who want to advance in their spiritual development.

During the American presidential campaign of 2016, Abramović unexpectedly became the subject of conspiracy theories whose authors claimed that the Serbian artist was a Satanist. Among the many leaked emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, published by Wikileaks, one was from Abramović. She invited John Podesta’s brother, art collector Tony Podesta, to a “Spirit cooking dinner,” and asked whether John Podesta also wanted to join the event. Tony Podesta forwarded this email to his brother, and it finally ended up among the hacked emails. Various right-wing groups and conspiracy theorists immediately searched the Internet for the words “spirit cooking,” and found “evidence” that Abramović was actually a leader of a secret satanic cult involving several high-ranking Washington politicians. What they actually found was an old video of the artist preparing her installation Spirit Cooking with Power Objects (1997) in a gallery called Zerynthia in Paliano, Italy. Indeed, this video is not for those with a weak stomach: using a thick brush dipped in a container full of coagulated pig blood, Abramović writes different texts called Spirit Cooking on the walls of the gallery. She then places several human-shaped figurines, that she calls Power Objects, in the corner of the gallery, and splashes them with blood.

It is perhaps not surprising that such scenes might look “satanic” to some people. However, the Power Objects were actually made from anthropomorphic candles used in Hoodoo and other popular Afro-American syncretic spiritualities, which are also often wrongly presented in Western media as “black magic” or “Satanism.” Initially, Spirit Cooking was a collection of Abramović’s “absurd poetry’” or a “cookbook” with “aphrodisiac recipes,” which accompanied her portfolio of etchings produced in 1996. These “recipes” contained unusual ingredients such as blood, sperm, or urine, She later used her Spirit Cooking poetry in combination with Power Objects, as described above, but also in a form of an eccentric “cookbook” which was given to customers of a New York restaurant, Park Avenue Winter, who offered a dessert called “Volcano Flambé” invented by Abramović in 2011. According to Abramović, it was this kind of gastronomic experience, after all a “normal dinner, ” she was having in mind when she sent her notorious invitation to a “Spirit Cooking dinner at her place” (Russeth 2016).

Conspiracy theorists did not accept this explanation. The fact that Abramović was also teaching her Method to pop-star Lady Gaga, and that she danced with rapper Jay Z, both of whom are believed by conspiracy theorists to be involved with the secret world government of the “Illuminati,” only added fuel to the fire. It should be added that Abramović had indeed been playing with magic and perhaps Satanist symbols during an eccentric photo-shoot for the Ukrainian edition of Vogue in 2014. [Image at right] One photo shows her holding a goat head, represented also in the Sigil of Baphomet, whose origins in the system of magic of Éliphas Lévi (1810-1875) were not Satanic but that later was also used as an official symbol of the Church of Satan. Another photo shows her standing behind “butchered” female bodies, as a kind of a sinister priestess. However, there is no evidence that Abramović is in fact a Satanist. According to Massimo Introvigne, “one needs to worship the character called the Devil or Satan in the Bible” to be defined as a Satanist. Abramović has no intentions whatsoever to worship Satan, but simply uses certain symbols that have been used by Satanists as well as by other non-Satanist occult groups, in a different context and often “in a rather playful way” (Introvigne 2016).

One unintended effect of the conspiracy theorists’ attacks against Abramović was to boost the sales of her autobiographic book Walking Through Walls (Abramović 2016). The book had been written before the controversies of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, and did not mention the Spirit cooking dinners nor the Ukrainian Vogue photographs. Walking Through Walls, however, makes it easier to reconstruct the multiple sources of the artist’s spirituality and of the Abramović Method. They are indeed disparate, from Australian Aboriginal religion to Buddhism, Western esotericism, New Age, and African American magic. But none of these is part of Satanism.

IMAGES**
**All images are clickable links to enlarged representations.

Image #1: Photograph of Marina Abramović.

Image #2: Abramović performing Rhythm 5 (1974).

Image #3: Abramović performing Thomas Lips (1975).

Image #4: Abramović and Ulay performing Relation in Time (1977).

Image #5: A participant using one of the Transitory objects, during the presentation of The Abramović Method in Milan, 2012.

Image #6: Abramović assisting John of God, during one of his “visible surgeries.” Still from the documentary The Space in Between: Marina Abramović and Brazil, 2016.

Image #7: Abramović performing “reiki-like” technique on a member of the audience, during her 512 Hours performance (2014).

Image #8: The audience performing the Counting the Rice exercise, during the presentation of The Abramović Method in Sydney in 2015.

Image #9: One of the so called “Satanic” images of Abramović in the Ukrainian Vogue in 2014.

REFERENCES

Abramović, Marina. 2014. 512 Hours. London: Koenig Books.

Abramović, Marina. 2008. Marina Abramović. London: Phaidon.

Abramović, Marina. 2004. The Biography of Biographies. Milano: Charta.

Abramović, Marina, with James Kaplan. 2016. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir. New York: Crown Archetype.

Art Meets Science. 2013. Art meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy, DVD. Amsterdam and New York: Asset Foundation/Mystic Fire Video. Accessed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O383LOPbALs on 19 March 2017.

Avgita, Louisa. 2012. “Marina Abramović’s Universe: Universalising the Particular in Balkan Epic.” Pp. 7-28 in Cultural Policy, Criticism and Management Research 6. London: City University of London.

Baas, Jacquelyn, and Mary Jane Jacob. 2004. Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Biesenbach, Klaus. 2010. “Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present. The Artist was Present. The Artist Will Be Present.” Pp. 12-21 in The Artist is Present, edited by Marina Abramović. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Denegri, Ješa. 1996. Sedamdesete: Teme srpske umetnosti. Novi Sad: Svetovi.

Djurdjevic, Gordan. 2013. “Hidden Wisdom in the Ill-Ordered House. A Short Survey of Occultism in Former Yugoslavia.” Pp. 70-100 in Occultism in a Global Perspective, edited by Henrik Bogdan and Gordan Djurdjevic. Durham: Acumen Publishing.

Drinkall, Jacquelene A. 2005. Telepathy in Contemporary, Conceptual and Performance Art. PhD dissertation,The University of New South Wales.

Đurić Mišina, Veljko. 2009. Varnava. Patrijarh srpski. Sremski Karlovci/Beograd: Eparhija sremska/Parohija Hrama Svetog Save.

Introvigne, Massimo. 2016. “Spirit Cooking, Satanism — Art and the Occult. A statement by Massimo Introvigne.” Zero=Two blog (13 December 2016). Accessed from http://zeroequalstwo.net/spirit-cooking-and-satanism-performance-art-and-magick/ on 19 March 2017.

Jung, Carl Gustav. 1971 [1955]. Mysterium Coniunctionis: Untersuchungen über die Trennung und Zusammensetzung der seelischen Gegensätze in der Alchemie. Olten und Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter Verlag.

Jurčić, Zrinka. 1974. “Život u umjetnosti.” Oko magazine (8 May 1974). Available in the archive of the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, Press Clippings, January-December, 1974-1975.

Kontova, Helena. 1978. “Interview with Abramovic and Ulay.” Pp. 43-44 in Flash Art 80/81.

Kuhlman, Rosl. 2009. Die Fremde im Werk von Marina Abramović. Lothar Baumgarten und Nikolaus Lang. PhD dissertation, Universität Osnabrück.

Lončarić, Davor. 1974. “Josef Beuys — magla u filcanom šeširu.” Oko magazine, May 9. Available in the archive of the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, Press Clippings, January-December, 1974-1975.

n.a. 1975. Nagrada sedam sekretara SKOJ-a za 1973. i 1974/. Zagreb: Galerija nova (Centar za kulturnu delatnost SSO).

O’Brien, Sophie. 2014. “A Resonant Emptiness.” Pp. 13-55 in 512 Hours, edited by Marina Abramović. London: Koenig Books.

Postolović, Aleksandar. 1974. “U povodu ‘Zvezde od vatre’ Marine Abramović.” Bulletin of the III April Meetings (0), Beograd: Studentski kulturni centar. Available in the archive of the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade.

Richards, Mary. 2010. Marina Abramović. London/New York: Routledge.

Rocha, Cristina. 2017. John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing. New York: Oxford University Press.

Russeth, Andrew. 2016. “Marina Abramovic on Right-Wing Attacks: ‘It’s Absolutely Outrageous and Ridiculous’.” Artnews website, November 4. Acccesed from http://www.artnews.com/2016/11/04/marina-abramovic-on-right-wing-attacks-its-absolutely-outrageous-and-ridiculous/ on 19 March 2017.

Schloen, Anne. 2006. Die Renaissance des Goldes, Gold in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ph.D. dissertation, Universität zu Köln.

Slavinski, Živorad Mihajlović. 1973. Ključevi psihičke magije. Belgrade: The Author.

Stiles, Kristine. 2008. “Cloud with its Shadow: Marina Abramović.” Pp. 33-94 in Marina Abramović, edited by Marina Abramović. London: Phaidon.

Stokić, Jovana. 2014. “Beuys’s Lesson in Belgrade.” Post (MoMA’s online resource). Accessed from http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/554-beuys-s-lesson-in-belgrade on 19 March 2017.

Stokić, Jovana. 2010. “The Art of Marina Abramović: Leaving the Balkans, Entering the Other Side.” Pp. 23-28 in The Artist is Present, edited by Marina Abramović. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Stokić, Jovana. 2008. Marina Abramović Speaks with Jovana Stokić. Madrid: La Fábrica and Fundación Telefónica.

The Art Newspaper. 2011. The Art Newspaper, April. Accessed from http://www.museologie.uqam.ca/Page/Document art_newspaper_2011-04.pdf on 19 March 2017.

Westcott, James. 2010. When Marina Abramović Dies: A Biography. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Post Date:
15 January 2017

JULIUS EVOLA TIMELINE

1898 (May 19):  Giulio Cesare Andrea (mainly known as Jules or Julius for most of his life) was born in Rome, Italy.

1914:  Evola met Giovanni Papini, who in turn introduced him to the founder of the Futurist movement Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

1915:  Evola began painting. His Sensorial Idealism period began.

1916:  Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball and others created the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

1918:  Upon returning from WWI, Evola had a spiritual crisis and contemplated suicide. Reading the early Buddhist text titled Majjhimanikàjo helped him recover temporarily.

1919:  Evola exhibited his Futurist works at the Grand National Futurist Exhibition.

1920:  Evola adhered to the Dadaist movement and corresponded with Tristan Tzara.

1920:  His adherence to Dada was the beginning of his Mystic Abstract period. Interior Landscape, 10:30 and Abstraction belong to this period.

1920 (January):  The first exhibition focusing solely on Evola’s paintings took place at the Bragaglia Art House.

1920:  Evola published a pamphlet, Abstract Art, in the Collection Dada series.

1921 (January):  Evola’s first exhibition abroad, at Berlin’s Der Sturm Art Gallery

1921 (May 9):  Evola’s art was exhibited at the Grotte dell’Augusteo in Rome.

1923:  More fascinated by philosophy and mysticism, Evola abandoned painting altogether.

1925:  Evola’s Philosophical Period began.

1925:  Evola published Essays on Magical Idealism.

1934:  Evola published Revolt Against the Modern World. 

1945:  In Vienna, Evola was hit by shrapnel during a Russian bombing and remained paralyzed from the waist down.

1958:  Evola’s book Metaphysics of Sex was published, and Evola began painting again, this time on themes connected to sex and women.

1963:  Art historian Enrico Crispolti organised a retrospective of Evola’s work at La Medusa gallery in Roma.

1974 (June 11):  Evola died in Rome, in his home (197, Corso Vittorio Emanuele).

BIOGRAPHY

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (1898-1974), [Image at right] known to most as Julius Evola, was an occultist, philosopher, expert on Eastern religions and political thinker, who characterised Italian conservative thought throughout the twentieth century. Born into a Catholic family, son of Sicilian parents. Vincenzo Evola (1854-1944) and Concetta Mangiapane (1865-1956), Evola seems to have opposed Christian religion since his early teenage years, when he discovered the writings of Otto Weininger (1880-1903) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). In his own words, he “spent entire days in [his] library, in a dense but free reading regime” (Evola 1963:5).

By going through a process of de-gentrification, through the Florentine avant-garde movement, Evola discovered Giovanni Papini (1881-1956), author, poet and editor of several journals, which attempted to defy the Italian status-quo at the beginning of the century. It is through journals such as Leonardo (established in 1903) and the Futurist Lacerba (1913), both edited by Papini, that Evola first encountered two milieus which would heavily characterise his early years: art and occultism (Giudice 2016:115-22). Through Papini, Evola was introduced to the founder of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), and to Futurist painter Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), who in turn encouraged the young Evola to begin his artistic career as a painter. Evola’s first steps in the world of fine arts, then, may safely be dated to 1915, under the tutelage of two of the greatest representatives of the Futurist movement (A.M. 1920:3).

Evola’s involvement with the occult establishment in Rome was also very precocious. His first encounter with members of that milieu can be found in his collaboration with the Theosophical journal Ultra (established in 1907); his speeches at the Lega Teosofica Indipendente (Independent Theosophical League), an Italian splinter group of the Theosophical Society; and his friendship with the editor of Ultra and future member of Italian parliament, Decio Calvari (1863-1937). Evola remembered Calvari as a “personality of real value” who would introduce him to “the first notions of Tantrism” (Rossi 1994:44).

Evola’s deep interest in spirituality began in 1917-1918, when, having returned from World War One, he faced a spiritual crisis so profound that he contemplated the idea of suicide. Evola recovered from this crisis between the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920, after having read a passage of an early Buddhist text, which he refers to as Majjhimanikàjo, obviously alluding to the Majjhima Nikaya (III c. BCE – II c. BCE). The passage in question reads: “He who, accepts death as death, and having accepted death as death, thinks about death, and thinks ‘Mine is Death’ and rejoices, he, I say, does not know death” (Batchelor 1996:12).

Evola’s brief painting career may be divided into two precise periods, the first one beginning just before leaving for the war in 1915 and ending with the overcoming of his spiritual crisis in 1920. This first period, which Evola himself called Idealismo Sensoriale (Sensorial Idealism), was marked by the Idealism propounded by journals such as Leonardo and by the pictorial techniques of Futurist painters such as Balla and Arnaldo Ginna (1890-1982), author of the Futurist Cinema Manifesto and member of the Theosophical Society (Ginna:1916).

Sensorial Idealism, according to art curator Enrico Crispolti, “represented the need for something more solid [than earlier Futurist painting] of a more precise aesthetics as well as a more synthetic technique, fresher and less chaotic” (Crispolti 1998:23). That Evola was interested in a more spiritual approach to painting may already be noticed in one of his 1917 articles dealing with art, “Ouverture alla Pittura della Forma Nuova” (Oeverture to the Painting of the New Form), in which the author argued for a necessity to reach a new spirituality unattainable by Futurism (Lista 1984:142). Spirituality, even in the Futurist period of Sensorial Idealism, was thus very prominent in Evola’s artwork: “The form is called spiritual in that it does not imply an intellectual representation of the object, nor the transcendental interpretation of the object […], rather, it is something absolutely foreign to the object, which is locked deep down within us” (Lista 1984:142).

The spiritual dimension of Evola’s Futurist period was attested to by Ginna, who remembered the exchange of books between himself and Evola in the following passage: “Evola, like me, was interested in occultism, reaching, according to his own inclination, his own conclusions. I do not know how to precisely define Evola’s studies and experiences, I only know that each of us held in our hands Theosophical books by Besant and Blavatsky and, later on, the Anthroposophical works of Rudolf Steiner” (Ginna 1984:136).

Of this period, Evola’s most characteristic paintings are without a doubt Fucina, Studio di Rumori (Forge, a Study on Noises, ca. 1917), Five o’clock tea (ca. 1918), [Image at right] and Mazzo di Fiori (Bouquet of Flowers, 1918). In 1919, Evola was invited to showcase his artwork at the Grand National Futurist Exhibition. There, the ideas derived from Sensorial Idealism were clearly manifested:

The paintings relating to Evola’s first phase of his research […] manifest, though a notable inclination towards a synthetic intention, an attention towards a dynamic ‘sensorial’ exaltation, still strongly conditioned by certain eventual correspondences rather than by an evocative-representative urge or by an abstract analogical resolution.

In his “Ouverture,” Evola wrote: “New form = spiritual form exclusively – greatest synthesis = beauty of the individual against the beauty of nature = architecture of thought. With regards to technique = abolition of flatness (decorative) + dynamic volumes of the three dimensions with lines that represent forces only” (Lista 1984:143).

At the end of 1919, Evola discovered the work of Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) and wrote his first letter to the Romanian artist, adhering to the Dadaist Manifesto Tzara had written in 1918. His wholehearted embrace of Dadaism signals at once the abandonment of the Futurist milieu and the need for a new expressive medium that only Dada could seem to provide Evola with. As art historian Federica Franci rightly pointed out, “while pre-war avant-gardes had a direct link to the art of the past (the expressionists with Van Gogh, the cubists with Cézanne, the futurists with Divisionism and Neo-impressionism), only the Dadaists drastically severed every bond with art’s old paradigms” (Iannello-Franci 2011:45).

His correspondence with Tzara began with a letter dated October 7, 1919, from which the reader can glean the florid condition of the vibrant Italian avant-garde scene, and the blossoming of a collaboration between the Italian and the Swiss/French avant-garde: “I am creating a Modern Art Journal in Rome (Govoni, Marinetti, Onofri, d’Alba, Folgore, Casella, Prampolini, Tirwhytt, Depero etc.). If it were possible to get in touch, as I wish, I would be most happy to ask you to be the first collaborator and to make this journal a source of Dadaist propaganda in Italy” (Valento 1991:16). 1920 was Evola’s annus mirabilis with regards to his artistic career. His “mystical abstract” period can be said to begin in this year, which was marked by two important events in Evola’s life: his first personal exhibition at the Bragaglia Art House in January, and the publication of his short essay Arte Astratta (Abstract Art) in the prestigious Collection Dada series. In a letter dated February 21, 1920, it is Evola himself who certifies the beginning of his mystical abstract period, writing to Tzara: “I have exhibited some Dadaist paintings in Rome” (Valento 1991:21).

In Arte Astratta, Evola’s spiritual tension, which was creating a gulf between him and his Futurist colleagues such as Balla, Marinetti and Enrico Prampolini (1894-1956), was analysed even more deeply than before. “Modern art will fall soon,” Evola concluded at the end of his essay, “and this will be the sign of its purity. It will fall, moreover, because it has been created with a method from the outside / because of a gradual elevation of sickness over partly passionate reasons / rather than from the inside / mystically.” Evola’s idea of art in this important essay is that of the artist’s work as a tiny fragment of light in a world of darkness:

Abstract art may never be historically eternal and universal: this, a priori – PLOTINUS, ECKHART, MAETERLINK, NOVALIS, RUYSBROEK, SVEDEMBORG [sic], TZARA, RIMBALD [sic]… all of this is but a brief, rare and insecure lightning through the great death, the great nocturn reality of corruption and disease. In a similar way, it is the rarity of unspeakable gems among the enormous muddy [G]anges (Evola 1920:14).

The spiritual nature of Evola’s abstract paintings may be gleaned by the titles of his works of the period going from 1919 to 1921: Paesaggio Interiore, [Image at right] IIlluminazione (Interior Landscape, Illumination), 1919-1920; Paesaggio Interiore: Apertura del Diaframma (Interior Landscape: Opening of the Diaphragm) of 1920-1921; Paesaggio Interiore, Ore 3 (Interior Landscape, Three o’Clock), 1920-1921; La Fibra si Infiamma e le Piramidi (The Fibre Inflames Itself and The Pyramids), 1920-1921; La Parola Oscura (The Obscure Word), 1921. Evola exhibited fifty-six works at another event at the Bragaglia Art House in 1921, alongside fellow artists Aldo Fiozzi (1894-1941) and Gino Cantarelli (1899-1950). He then showed sixty of his paintings at Berlin’s Der Sturm gallery. During the first of these events, Evola also read some Dadaist compositions he had written about the subject of what being a Dadaist artist meant to him: “Instead of simplicity, he chooses fiction; against passion, a whim; against the idol, himself, infinite and unspeakable nothingness […]. He lives only to deny and destroy and has no other function, because of his suffering in living. This is Dada” (Valento 1991:40)

However, Evola’s suffering, his spiritual crisis, which had plagued him from the end of the Great War, did not abandon him. In a letter dated July 2, 1921, the Roman painter wrote to Tzara:

I live in a state of constant tiredness, in a state of still stupor, in which all activities or desires are frozen. It is terribly Dada. Every action disgusts me: even having feelings I see as a malady, and I only have the terror of passing the time in front of me, of which I don’t know what to do with […] Such a state of mind, even though with different intensity, already existed within me: like in a show: I mean to say, there was someone on the outside looking, and he took notes on this strange occurrence: hence my art and my Dadaist philosophy. Nowadays, I realise that there is nobody left in the theatre, that everything is useless and ridiculous, that every expression is a disease (Valento 1991:40-1).

At the age of twenty-three, in 1921, Evola decided to end his career as a painter to try and solve the problems of his soul through a more spiritual approach.

The first book to be published by Evola after his crisis was Saggi sull’Idealismo Magico (Essays on Magical Idealism 1925), which contained an appendix dedicated to art entitled “Sul Significato dell’Arte Modernissima” (On the Meaning of Hyper-Modern Art). In it, Evola still seems to follow the developments in the contemporary art world and has his personal criticism towards abstract art in general, and Futurism and Dadaism in particular. Conscious that the subject matter would be alien to most who would buy a text on magical idealism, Evola used terms that are at once more understandable and immediate for both the art connoisseur and the profane. It is very hard to give an idea of the spiritual state, which corresponds to the latest works of abstract art,” he wrote,

as is to have a possibility to not only penetrate and live them in any way, but also to just realise their value, if one is not very familiar with the technique of ‘pure art’, and if one doesn’t have within him already a certain stage of extremely interior and rarefied consciousness, to which the author has arrived (since only like may understand like). He who, not being equipped with these conditions, approached abstract art as he would approach for example [the art] of a Shelley or a Beethoven, would not find but an incoherent and incomprehensible whole, and therefore would be disgusted and shocked by the very possibility of such manifestations (Evola 1925:193-194).

In other words, arte modernissima was closely linked to spiritual development, the lack of which would keep the viewer outside of the artist’s realm.

For the following thirty years, Evola wrote about esotericism and politics, and did not devote any special attention to art. More than thirty years after Essays on Magical Idealism, however, Evola published his Metafisica del Sesso (Metapysics of Sex 1958), a text with wide-ranging topics such as sex and inhibition in the bourgeois modern world; sexual techniques in initiatory contexts; and the sexual role of woman as initiator of spiritual awakening. Evola, enthused by the subject matter of his book, began painting again: a third period, entirely dedicated to women and womanhood. Written in a historical period when feminist battles for women’s rights were on the rise in Italy, Metaphysics focused instead on the transcendent sacralisation of sex. His then publisher, Vanni Scheiwiller (1934-1999), helped organise an exhibition of Evola’s paintings at the prestigious Medusa gallery in Piazza di Spagna, Rome. Enrico Crispolti was the curator of the event, which Scheiwiller described as “a success: everything sold out” (Scheiwiller 1998:17). Of this later period in life are the Nudo di Donna (Afroditico) (Female Nude, Aphroditic, 1960-1970), Cosmos (1965-1970), and the most famous painting of the period, La Generatrice dell’Universo (The Generatrix of the Universe, 1968-1970). [Image at right]

Julius Evola died in his home in 1974 at age seventy-six.

IMAGES**
**All images are clickable links to enlarged representations.

Image #1: Julius Evola at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia, 1921.

Image #2: Julius Evola, Fucina, Studio di Rumori, 1917-1918.

Image #3: Julius Evola, Paesaggio Interiore, Apertura del Diaframma, 1920-1921.

Image #4: Julius Evola, La Genitrice dell’Universo, 1968-1970.

REFERENCES

A.M. 1920. “Il Pittore Futurista J. Evola.” Roma Futurista 3:3.

Batchelor, Stephen. 1996. “Existence, Enlightenment, and Suicide: The Dilemma of Nanavira Thera.” The Buddhist Forum 4:9-33.

Carli, Carlo Fabrizio. 1998. “Evola, la Pittura e l’Alchimia: Un Tracciato.” Pp. 49-60 in Julius Evola e l’Arte delle Avanguardie, tra Futurismo, Dada e Alchimia. Rome: Fondazione Julius Evola.

Crispolti, Enrico. 1998. “Evola Pittore. Tra Futurismo e Dadaismo.” Pp. 19-31 in Julius Evola e l’Arte delle Avanguardie, tra Futurismo, Dada e Alchimia. Rome: Fondazione Julius Evola.

Evola, Julius. 1963. Il Cammino del Cinabro. Rome: Scheiwiller.

Evola, Julius. 1958. Metafisica del Sesso. Rome: Atanòr.

Evola, Julius. 1934. Rivolta contro il Mondo Moderno. Milan: Hoepli.

Evola, Julius. 1925. “Sull’Arte Modernissima.” Pp. 139-52 in Saggi sull’Idealismo Magico. Rome and Todi: Atan òr.

Evola, Julius. 1920. Arte Astratta: Posizione Teorica. Rome: Maglione e Strini.

Ginna, Arnaldo. 1984. “Brevi Note sull’Evola nel Tempo Futurista.” Pp. 135-37 in Testimonianze su Evola, edited by Gianfranco De Turris. Rome: Mediterranee.

Ginna, Arnaldo. 1916. “Il Cinema Futurista.” L’Italia Futurista 9:2-4.

Giudice, Christian. 2016. Occultism and Traditionalism: Arturo Reghini and the Antimodern Reaction in Early Twentieth Century Italy. Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet.

Iannello, Andrea A., and Federica Franci. 2011 Evola Dadaista: Dada non Significa Nulla. Caserta: Giuseppe Vozza Editore.

Lista, Giovanni. 1984. Balla le Futuriste. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 1909. “Le Futurisme.” Le Figaro, February 20, p. 1.

Nanamoli, Bikkhu and Bodhi Bikkhu, trans. 1995. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Somerville: Wisdom Publications.

Rossi, Marco. 1994. “Julius Evola e la Lega Teosofica Indipendente.” Storia Contemporanea 25: 39-56.

Valento, Elisabetta. 1994. Homo Faber: Julius Evola tra Arte e Alchimia. Rome: Fondazione Julius Evola.

Valento, Elisabetta, ed. 1991. Lettere di Julius Evola a Tristan Tzara (1919-1923). Rome: Fondazione Julius Evola.

Post Date:
15 March 2017

OBERTO AIRAUDI TIMELINE

1950 (May 29):  Oberto Airaudi was born in Balangero, in the province of Turin, Italy.

1967:  Airaudi published his first book, Poesie dei miei sedici anni (Poems of a sixteen years old). He also produced his first painting, Pensiero già arrivato ai primi segni ritrovati, collaudati in verità (My thought has just arrived to the first symbols, and they have been rediscovered and proven true).

1969:  Although the legal age in Italy at that time was twenty-one, Airaudi successfully petitioned the Court of Turin to be recognized of age at nineteen and marry.

1975:  Having abandoned his activity as an insurance broker, Airaudi founded in Turin the Centro Ricerche e Informazioni Horus (Horus Research and Information Center), devoted to esotericism, naturopathy, and parapsychology.

1970s:  Airaudi became part of the artistic avant-garde milieu in Turin, and was particularly influenced by the Concrete Art Movement and by painter Filippo Scroppo.

1975-1977:  Airaudi first conceived the idea of an esoteric community and started purchasing land in the Valchiusella valley.

1979:  The first community of Damanhur was inaugurated.

1980 (ca.):  Airaudi started producing his signature “Selfic” paintings.

1992:  The Temples of Humankind, kept secret for years, were “discovered” through the revelations of a disgruntled former member, and they became public knowledge.

1996:  With the settlement of the corresponding legal cases, Airaudi and Damanhur became legally entitled to open the Temples of Humankind to visitors.

2004 (September):  The “selfic cabin,” where Airaudi’s paintings were exhibited, was inaugurated within the Niatel art gallery in Vidracco, Piedmont.

2011 (May):  The first “selfic cabin” outside Italy, known as the Hawks Hill Cabin, was inaugurated in a private home in the Scotts Valley, near Santa Cruz, California.

2013 (June 23):  Oberto Airaudi died in the nucleo-community of Aval, located in Cuceglio, in the province of Turin. His followers believe that he continues to paint through students-mediums whom Airaudi himself prepared.

BIOGRAPHY

Oberto Airaudi (1950-2013) [Image at right] is mostly known as the founder of Damanhur, a federation of communities with distinctive spiritual teachings inspired by Theosophy, the religion of ancient Egypt, and Western esotericism. Some 600 “citizens” of Damanhur live in more than twenty communities scattered around the Valchiusella valley, located thirty miles out of Turin, Italy, and another 400 live nearby, with “centers” catering to those who are interested in Damanhur’s worldview in several Italian and European cities, in the United States, and in Japan.

Airaudi was born in Balangero, in the province of Turin, Italy, on May 29, 1950. According to his autobiographic writings (Airaudi 2011) and to his followers, as a child he already experienced visions and prodigies, and was able to heal his friends. He was certainly precocious, as at age seventeen he published his first book of poems and produced his first known painting. He gave it the title Pensiero già arrivato ai primi segni ritrovati, collaudati in verità (My thought has just arrived to the first symbols, and they have been rediscovered and proven true). [Image at right]

Although at that time the legal age in Italy was twenty-one, at nineteen Airaudi successfully petitioned the court if Turin to be recognized of age and marry. He became the youngest licensed insurance broker in the region, but he also maintained a strong interest in alternative spirituality and healing. In 1975, having abandoned his activity as an insurance broker, Airaudi founded in Turin the Centro Ricerche e Informazioni Horus (Horus Research and Information Center), devoted to esotericism, naturopathy, and parapsychology, and became a popular esoteric lecturer in the region. Between 1975 and 1977, Airaudi first conceived the idea of an esoteric community and started purchasing land in the Valchiusella valley. In 1979, the first community of Damanhur was inaugurated and Airaudi’s social and spiritual experiment eventually grew to become the largest New Age-esoteric commune in Europe. It includes now schools for children (Introvigne 1999a) and a sizable number of second generation members. In Damanhur, Airaudi took the name of Falco Tarassaco. In Italian, Falco means “hawk,” and “Tarassaco” is Italian for Taraxacum officinale, the common dandelion, which has healing properties.

While the community, or rather communities, of Damanhur have been frequently described by scholars of new religious movements and intentional communities and journalists (see e.g. Berzano 1998; Merrifield 1998; Introvigne 1999b), Airaudi’s artistic activity has received less attention. Airaudi, however, always regarded himself as an artist as wells as a community leader, and art maintains a central role in Damanhur’s spirituality (Zoccatelli 2016).

Before founding Damanhur, Airaudi became part of Turin’s artistic avant-garde. He was particularly influenced by the Concrete Art Movement. This Italian movement was founded in 1948 to promote non-figurative art, in particular art with a strong emphasis on abstraction, free from imitation and reference to the outside world. The term “Concrete Art” had been coined in France by the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg (born Christian Emil Marie Küpper, 1883-1931), closely associated with the De Stijl (The Style) art movement, also known as Neoplasticism, and strongly influenced by Theosophy. Although van Doesburg was not a member of the Theosophical Society, he knew about Theosophy through the most important artist and theorist of De Stijl, fellow Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), who was a member of the Society for all his life.

An examination of Airaudi’s early paintings evidences the influence of Filippo Scroppo (1910-1993), a pastor of the Waldensian Church, the oldest Italian Protestant denomination, and a prominent representative of the Concrete Art movement in Turin [Image at right]. This is not surprising, as the young Airaudi and the Concrete Art painters were part of the same Turin avant-garde milieu and shared a common interest in Theosophy. After the foundation of Damanhur, Airaudi’s artistic creativity was mostly devoted to direct the construction of the underground Temples of Humankind, whose existence was kept secret by Damanhur for more than twelve years. Only in 1992, through the revelations of a disgruntled ex-member, did the media and the Italian authorities discover the underground temple. Tax and zoning authorities claimed that it had been built illegally and threatened to destroy it. The legal cases, however, were settled in 1996, and from then on Damanhur was legally entitled to keep its temple and to open it to visitors. In the first years of media attention after the discovery of the temple, Damanhur welcomed 50,000 visitors per year. More recently, the number has stabilized around 20,000 (see Esperide Ananas and Stambecco Pesco 2009).

The Temples of Humankind are a huge subterranean complex comprised of a fantastic collection of richly decorated rooms and galleries. It is an underground work of art, completely built, or rather excavated, and decorated by hand. It includes rooms known as the Hall of Water, the Hall of Earth, the Hall of Spheres, the Hall of Mirrors, the Hall of Metals, the Blue Temple, and the Labyrinth. As Introvigne and Zoccatelli noted in 2010, “for Damanhur’s citizens, the temple is much more than a means of expressing their artistic creativity; it is a ‘mystical pole,’ at which ritual work takes place for the benefit of the whole of humanity. A number of different rituals express a worldview based on the sanctity of nature, karma, reincarnation, and the tradition of Western esotericism” (Introvigne and Zoccatelli 1010:853). [Image 4 at right]

Art in general is of central importance in the spiritual experience of Damanhur. In the philosophy of Airaudi, art is perceived as a unique carrier of spiritual teachings. “I produce paintings,” Airaudi said, “because there are things I can only write in this way. With my ‘Selfic’ Paintings I try to give an aesthetic idea of my esoteric message” (Arciere Aglio 2006:5).

“Selfic painting” is the name Airaudi gave to his own art. In fact, Selfica is one of the most peculiar beliefs within the philosophical and spiritual system of Damanhur. The words “Self” and “Selfica” are not part of the Italian language. “Self” is, of course, an English word. Airaudi borrowed it, but changed its meaning to designate the spiral as a fundamental form of life. For the Damanhur community, Selfica is also a field of spiritual research and a science, by which Damanhurians try to contact energies and intelligent beings from other dimensions and planets. They use rituals and “Selfic machines” to mobilize the special energy associated with the spiral form. They believe that the science of Selfica was known in the ancient Egyptian, Etruscan, Celtic and Minoan cultures.

The basis of Selfica is the notion that the spiral form is endowed with special powers. Devices and “machines” (“Selfs”), based on the spiral form and constructed of certain metals, colors, special inks, and minerals, are built in Damanhur to be used as catalysts to attract forces and beings from other planes of existence. Building a Selfic structure, Airaudi taught, is like constructing bodies that these forces and beings may claim as their own and use. It is also an aesthetic and artistic experience.

Airaudi’s Selfic paintings, in turn, are not merely works of art. According to Damanhurian Esperide Ananas (born Silvia Buffagni), Damanhurians take the names of flowers and/or animals when the join the community). These works are “defined as ‘Selfic paintings’, because they are based on what he [Airaudi] claimed was an ancient art that conveys ‘intelligent’ energies through two-dimensional forms created by signs and colors” (Esperide Ananas 2004:A II). Selfic paintings are believed to have their own auras that affect the space around them. The size of the Selfic painting is important, as it determines the scope of the aura’s effects. [Image 5 at right]

In Airaudi’s Selfic paintings, the function that spirals made of wire perform in the “Selfic machines” are performed by colors, which translate three dimensions into two. Selfic paintings, Airaudi believed, “are kept active by light and the attention of their observers. The colors, forms and signs are alive, animate and in constant transformation. They project signals and information to the surrounding environment and the viewer” (Esperide Ananas 2004:A II).

The key for reading Selfic paintings is given by Airaudi’s combination of colors, forms, and titles, with the latter always expressed in poetic form. Almost all Selfic paintings manifest various characteristics when viewed under different conditions of light. For example, daylight and ultraviolet light reveal different layers, and as a consequence, different meanings in each painting. When Selfic paintings are placed alongside one another, they create effects different from those of a single painting, because they “live” in symbiosis and interact with one another in the mind of the viewer.

Damanhurians explain that a maximum amplification of the paintings’ functions can be obtained within a Selfic cabin. It is a structure created by the display of at least thirty-three Selfic paintings, if possible from different periods, with different themes and sizes, along with a spherical Selfic machine called a “Spheroself.” The Selfic machine consists of wire spirals and a sphere that contains a “special alchemical liquid” (Selet online catalog n.d.). The Niatel gallery, located in the town of Vidracco, in the arts and wellness center open by the communities to the public called Damanhur Crea, houses a permanent exhibition of Selfic paintings. Known as “Niatel, Galleria dei Quadri Selfici di Oberto Airaudi” (Niatel, Gallery of Oberto Airaudi’s Selfic Paintings), it is the most complex “Selfic cabin” in the world. According to Esperide Ananas, who has been living in Damanhur for over twenty years, where she conducts research in the field of Selfica, “a Selfic cabin is a true gateway to higher energies and intelligences, a space for amplifying therapeutic effects and the ideal place to work on perceptions, dreams, and to reach a state of increased integration and mental harmony” (Esperide Ananas 2013:189).

In addition to the cabin created at Damanhur from the permanent exhibition of Airaudi’s Selfic paintings, there are other cabins worldwide, located in the United States, Japan, and Croatia. The first one outside of Italy, known as the Hawks Hill Cabin, opened in late May 2011 in a private home in Scotts Valley located in the mountains behind Santa Cruz, California. The Hawks Hill Cabin is becoming the heart of a Damanhurian community that meets regularly for meditation and research, and is called the “Selfic Temple” by its Californian users.

Although Airaudi produced thousands of paintings, he never offered a direct explanation of their meanings. However, he always wrote a “narration” on the back of a painting’s canvas, which goes beyond being a mere title and guides the viewer in reading and interpreting the work. In 2000, Airaudi painted what I personally consider his masterpiece and his best Selfic work. [Image 6 at right] It now greets visitors in the permanent exhibition of Selfic paintings located in Damanhur. The title, or narrative, reads as follows:

All the heavens in your hands, just as the shadows owned by the universes. We will have new equilibriums, and powers to explore. The geometries, in movement, will have adventure, the stars will shine in the extreme and cold darkness, heating new worlds. In you, synchronic moves, reflected thought, magic acts will develop. I am the visible key, the mystic door to the inner heavens. I welcome and reflect, pulsate and combine frequencies until I reach outside of times, of time. Aeonian intelligences assist to brief acts, hesitations, hints of power difficult to understand, for now. Liquid densities wait from above, impatient spiritual beings come and go from this birth-room, they attract waves-soul, for you. The hearts (where there are hearts) beat appropriate rhythms, ritual, moving, they ordered thought and theurgic magic. I am, observed, the door-frequency that half-closes itself, and that the sensitive knows how to dance, still hesitating. It is this the right behavior. All the heavens in your hands, now, just as the shadows owned by the universes… (Tempia Valenta 2004:AIII).

Oberto Airaudi’s Selfic paintings may be read on two levels. On the one hand, Airaudi was not an amateur artist and his work is a legitimate part of the Turin avant-garde of the twentieth century, expressed in such movements as the Italian version of Concrete Art. Airaudi’s paintings are open to iconographic readings of colors and forms, which find parallels in the Concrete Art style originating with Theo van Doesburg and passing through Filippo Scroppo and others. On the other hand, the emic reading by Damanhurians of the Selfic paintings is less interested in their artistic style and sources. For the members of the Damanhur community, Airaudi’s Selfic paintings are spiritual artifacts and ritual objects. Similar to the complicated Selfic machines, Airaudi’s paintings are regarded as portals capable of attracting intelligent energies and, ultimately, of saving the world from impending doom through the mystical power of the spiral form.

The creation of Selfic paintings in Damanhur did not end with Airaudi. Before dying, Airaudi instructed a selected group of students, to act as mediums and paint together guided by his spirit after his death. The paintings they produce are signed by “Oberto Airaudi through his mediums.”

IMAGES**
**All images are clickable links to enlarged representations.

Image #1: Photograph of Oberto Airaudi.

Image #2: Photograph of Pensiero già arrivato ai primi segni ritrovati, collaudati in verità (My thought has just arrived to the first symbols, and they have been rediscovered and proven true).

Image #3: One of Airaudi’s early paintings evidencing the influence of Filippo Scroppo on his work.

Image #4: Photograph of one of the rooms in The Temples of Humankind, a huge subterranean complex comprised of a fantastic collection of richly decorated rooms and galleries.

Image #5: Photograph of one of Airaudi’s Selfic paintings.

Image #6: Photograph of one of Airaudi’s most notable Selfic paintings.

REFERENCES

Airaudi, Oberto. 2011. Stories of an Alchemist: The Extraordinary Childhood Years of the Founder of Damanhur in 33 Tales. Vidracco, Italy: Niatel.

Arciere Aglio [Gianluca Gallerani]. 2006. I Quadri Selfici di Falco. Raccolta ragionata delle conoscenze attuali, dalle serate e i corsi di Oberto Airaudi. Unpublished typescript for internal circulation in the Damanhur community.

Berzano, Luigi. 1998. Damanhur. Popolo e comunità. Leumann. Turin: Elledici.

Esperide Ananas [Silvia Buffagni]. 2013. Spirals of Energy: The Ancient Art of Selfica. Vidracco: Devodama.

Esperide Ananas [Silvia Buffagni], and Stambecco Pesco [Silvio Palombo]. 2009. The Traveler’s Guide to Damanhur: The Amazing Northern Italian Eco-Society. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

Esperide Ananas [Silvia Buffagni]. 2006. Damanhur: Temples of Humankind. New York: CoSM Press.

Esperide Ananas [Silvia Buffagni]. 2004. “La Pittura Selfica – Selfic Painting.” Pp. AI-AII in Tempia Valenta 2004.

Introvigne, Massimo. 1999a, “Children of the Underground Temple: Growing Up in Damanhur.” Pp. 138-49 in Children in New Religions, edited by Susan J. Palmer and Charlotte Hardman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Introvigne, Massimo. 1999b. “Damanhur: A Magical Community in Italy.” Pp. 183-94 in New Religious Movements: Challenge and Response, edited by Bryan Wilson and Jamie Cresswell. New York: Routledge.

Introvigne, Massimo and PierLuigi Zoccatelli. 2010. “Damanhur.” Pp. 852-54 in Religions of the World: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Beliefs and Practices, Volume II, edited by J. Gordon Melton and Martin Baumann, Second Volume. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio.

Merrifield, Jeff. 1998. Damanhur: The Real Dream. London: Thorsons.

Selet. n.d. “Spheroself.” In Selet, online catalog. Accessed from http://www.sel-et.com/en/products-eng/high-technology-selfica/spheroself-detail on 12 March 2017.

Tempia Valenta, Eraldo, ed. 2004. Quadri Selfici di Oberto Airaudi. Turin: Il Mettifoglio.

Zoccatelli, PierLuigi. 2016. “‘All the Heavens in Your Hands:’ Oberto Airaudi and the Art of Damanhur.” Pp. 145-62 in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19:145-62.

Post Date:
18 March 2017