ENTER
THROUGH
THE IMAGE
The Ancient Image Language
of Myth, Art, & Dreams



L. Caruana

The image itself will show you the way...
Corpus Hermeticum (IV, 11)

INTRODUCTION

THE ANCIENT
MANNER OF THINKING
IN OUR MODERN ERA

And what of our human art?
Must we not say that... it produces
...a man-made dream for waking eyes?
      – Plato, Sophist (266c)(1)

I. The Lost Fragment

      An ancient heretical text buried for seventeen hundred years and only resurfacing in our century bore within its aged pages one short but endlessly intriguing fragment. The text, a Gnostic Christian work of the third century, was discovered in 1945 when two Muslim peasants accidentally unearthed a jar near Nag Hammadi Egypt containing twelve leather-bound books. Although one of the books was burned by their widowed mother for fuel, most of the volumes were brought to Cairo by a one-eyed merchant, where French scholars immediately recognized them as a fantastic cache of Gnostic gospels, preserving a long-forgotten outlook onto the world. Among the fifty two tractates, a single fragment of text enjoins us, quite mysteriously, to “...enter through the image.” (2)To regain the Ancient Philosophy behind this fragment is the journey that awaits us, keeping ever in mind that “the image itself will show you the way...”(3)
      In all cultural manifestations of the Sacred, from Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cylinder seals to Buddhist mandalas and Byzantine icons, an ancient mythic outlook is preserved in meaningful arrangements of images. To enter through the images of these older cultures is to behold, once again, the Sacred that lies at their source. Though these relics of art and remnants of their myths have been passed down to us, we have lost the key that, with its gentle turning, would release the mysteries locked within them. To step across their hallowed thresholds requires that we approach the images themselves, think in accord with their constructs, and so regain the ancient manner of image-thinking still contained in their ever-silent forms.
      Like art and myth, our dreams each night also create meaningful arrangements of images, improvising narratives that continually evolve into visions of eternal significance. The more ancient manner of image-thinking also manifests itself in dreamwork – a style of thought our cultural ancestors pursued in their sacred art and story telling, seeking thus to elevate its unknown workings into our understanding. If we wish to enter through the images of ancient culture, we must re-acquire their forgotten Image-Language, a language which continues its silent monologue still in our dreams. The ancient manner of thinking that underlies this Image-Language is precisely what we shall intend by the term ‘iconologic’.
      Iconologic, simply put, means thinking through images. In dreams, in myths, and in works of art, images are so composed as to bear their own unique message. The recurrence of certain motifs, now here in a dream, now there in a myth, suggests that an inherent order or logic underlies these arrangements. To uncover their forgotten language and expose its latent logic – or ‘iconologic’ – is the pressing task that presently lies before us. For, with this archaic knowledge, we will be able to enter through the images of ancient culture, and regain their ancient outlook onto life and the Sacred. What is more, with this knowledge, we will also be able to re-enter our dreams, and recover a view onto life long-since unconsidered.
      Iconologic, then, underlies the ancient Image-Language, and organizes our images into meaningful arrangements, be they the image-clusters of myth, art, or dreams. Those image-clusters which betray a recognizable meaning and arrangement shall be refered to, henceforth, as ‘iconologues’. Symbols, mythologems, and mythic narratives constitute the most obvious iconologues, though many others exist. For, symbols may be combined, myths may cross one another, and mythologems may be displaced from one culture to another. Hence, these continuous transformations shall also be included among those iconologues which will concern us over the course of our inquiry.
      The ultimate aim of this work is to uncover an array of such iconologues, and to think again through their antiquated forms to the Sacred at their source. For, through an understanding of their ancient Image-Language, we may regain an older, indeed, forgotten view unto life – a more ancient philosophy that sees life itself as a gradual unfolding of the Sacred.

II. The Quest for Iconologic

       Our quest for iconologic is not new. Many of our culture’s greatest thinkers have betrayed, through certain fragments in their works, the desire to seek out this lost manner of thinking. In each case, they saw image-thinking as a more ancient style of thought. For example, after a lifetime of tireless wandering through the dark forests and twisting caverns of his own innermost thought, Nietzsche realized that:
      
      In our sleep and in our dreams, we pass through the whole thought of earlier humanity. I mean, in the same way that man reasons in his dreams, he reasoned when in the waking state many thousands of years ...
      The dream carries us back into earlier states of human culture, and affords us a means of understanding it better.(4)

      This lone thinker, standing on the outermost edge and staring down into the abyss within himself, came to the important realization that man ‘reasons in dreams’ - just as man once reasoned while awake thousands of years ago. Presumably, Nietzsche meant in our ancient mythology, for he recognized that “myth itself is a kind or style of thinking.” (5)But, his insight also bespeaks the possibility of an iconologic, persisting over thousands of years, and sounding silently still in our own century.
      While it has indeed survived and remains with us unconsciously in dreams, this unique style of thinking was gradually forgotten over the course of Man’s history. It was replaced by a more logic-oriented discourse, based on the predicate logic of our spoken and written language. But, considering that Mankind formulated his ‘First Philosophy’ through mythical thinking, linking things mundane to those transcendent via symbol and metaphor, the loss of this older mode of thought was of profound consequence – for Mankind had thus lost the ancient image-language which allowed himto see the Sacred and speak of it, as was indeed the case in the distant past. Martin Heidegger, one of Nietzsche’s philosophical heirs, has written extensively(6)of the finis metaphysicae: how our age has witnessed the end of metaphysics, due to modern Man’s loss of the power to create a mythopoeic philosophy, as he did in more ancient times.

III. The ‘Archaic Vestiges’ and
‘Mental Antiquities’ of Dreams

      Another of this century’s seekers after the Ancient Image-Language, emerging shortly after Nietzsche’s plunge into madness and also seeking his destiny in the dark underground world of dreams, was Sigmund Freud. If Nietzsche’s Zarathustra unfolds like a dream in some ways symptomatic of his incipient madness, then Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, written twenty years later, reveals an intense striving to find in dreams the way out of such madness. Like Nietzsche, Freud suffered traumatically from the occasion of his father’s death. He acquired a neurosis which he was only able to cure by journeying into his dreams and re-emerging once more with the key to their decryption.
      In the process, Freud made a series of startling discoveries regarding the ways in which images are arranged in dreams. He discovered, first of all, that the images of dreams are symbols which, once interpreted in light of the dreamer’s free associations, reveal unconscious thoughts, wishes, and desires – even the lost memories of earliest childhood – which underlie our forgotten life-conflicts and otherwise hinder life’s on-going development. But, of even greater consequence, Freud came to realize in a chapter entitled ‘the Means of Representation in Dreams’ that ‘symbolization’ is not the only way in which images are arranged in dreams. ‘Condensation’, ‘displacement’, ‘reversal’ and other forms of ‘dreamwork’ also compose images into dream narratives – sometimes revealing, sometimes obscuring the deeper significance reposing beneath them. This series of ‘iconologues’ uncovered by Freud is not unique to dreams alone: ancient myths also betray a tendency to reverse, displace, and condense their images, thereby revealing or obscuring their underlying source.
       Like Nietzsche, Freud was enamoured of Ancient Greek culture, and saw the interpretation of dreams as a new hermeneutic capable of unveiling aspects of ancient cultures hitherto lost and forgotten. Indeed, Depth Psychology could be considered a veiled attempt to recover the ancient manner of thinking at the root of our lost Image-Language. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote:

      We can guess how much to the point is Nietzsche’s assertion that in dreams, ‘some primæval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path’; and we may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man’s archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him.
      Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we could have imagined possible; so that psychoanalysis can claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race.(7)

      In Sophocles’ tragedy of Oedipus Rex, Freud found an ancient myth that still functioned dynamically in the psyche of modern Man. It followed that, if such an ancient myth could illuminate the dark workings of the modern mind then, vice versa, an investigation into our present day-to-day fantasies, dreams, and delusions could reveal lost and forgotten fragments of mythologies past. Could, for example, the plot of the second and third parts of Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy – which, only fragments thereof have come down to us through time – be recovered by seeking out parallels of its narrative in our dreams? Would the Promethean fire, extinguished in our age, thereby be rekindled?
      It was Freud’s former disciple and eventual heretic, C. G. Jung, who extended the journey into darker realms of the unconscious, discovering beneath the personal figures populating dreams a whole host of archetypes from past mythologies. Jung distinguished between the dreamer’s ‘personal unconscious’, as explored by Freud, and this newly discovered cultural or ‘collective unconscious’, which he explored as a result of his traumatic break with Freud, who had always assumed the role of Jewish elder and patriarch.(8)
      Jung eventually realized that the figures in dreams were not only personal acquaintances from the dreamer’s waking world, but more archaic and universal figures, which the analyst was able to recognize through his knowledge of art and myth. These mythic figures arose from the older and darker recesses of the unconscious, das kollektive Unbewusste, an ancient fount of archaic memories. Jung described the collective unconscious as “a fund of unconscious images... a matrix of mythopoetic imagination which has vanished from our rational age.” (9)
      A knowledge of mythology thus became the means to orienting us further through dreams and, conversely, dreams could lead us further into the dark origins of our own earliest thinking. Following up Nietzsche and Freud’s original inspiration, Jung wrote:

      Many... mythological motifs... are also found in dreams, often with precisely the same significance... The comparison of dream motifs with those of mythology suggests the idea – already put forward by Nietzsche – that dream thinking should be regarded as a phylogenetically older mode of thought. (10)

      Jung’s contribution to the attempt, in our times, to regain this lost and forgotten manner of image-thinking comes with his discovery of the Archetypes. The Archetypes are precisely what myths and dreams share in common. In Jung’s own words, they are “...forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and, at the same time, as autochthonous, individual products of unconscious origin.”(11) Thus, figures such as ‘the Child’, ‘the Wise Old Man’, or ‘the Fool’ arise in dreams, fantasies, and delusions, but, as spontaneous products of our imagination, are also to be found in myths, fairy tales, and even Tarot cards.

IV. Myth, Narrative, and Time

      There are other figures who, during these darkened times, have journeyed into the chthonic realms of our primordial thinking. But, rather than following the dark forest path of dreams and madness, they travelled instead beside the dried river bed of ancient myth. The task was to re-animate the decayed structures and skeletal forms still encrusted like fossils along its banks.
      And the world that subsequently revealed itself in myth was not unlike the world of dreams and madness: full of wonder, terror, and pity; an everturning wheel of joy and woe, where delight quickly dissolved to darkened illusion and moments of agony broke through to God’s revelation.
      Especially in the writings of Northrop Frye, Mircea Eliade, Heinrich Zimmer, and Joseph Campbell, the attempt was made to bring ancient myths back to the fore of our modern consciousness. In particular, they discovered how myths are an arrangement of images in time. This is true both of Cosmogonic myths, involving the world’s creation or destruction; and Hero myths, involving the hero’s departure, descent, and deed performed at the darkest nadir, followed by his subsequent ascent and return. Hero myths in particular arrange their images in accord with distinctive narrative patterns, which arise in different forms due to differences in the hero’s task.
      In his final works, Northrop Frye explored the temporal structure and narrative patterns underlying our own cultural myth, realizing that the Christian narrative arranges images over linear time, which transpires in a once-only unfoldment of history. Over the course of linear history, certain images from the Creation recurr, undergoing modification from the Old Testament to the New, until they finally re-appear and resolve in the Apocalypse. Though Adam falls from Paradise at the beginning of time, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and other saviours culminating in Christ descend in their myths to a dark nadir, so as to restore that lost paradise. Only at the end of time, during the Apocalypse, will that vision of Paradise be fully restored.
      Hence, the narratives of Judæo-Christianity transpire in linear-historical time, and acquire, according to Frye, a U-shaped narrative structure. The hero task of Christianity is to restore, in the end, that paradise which was lost at the beginning. In this way, the Bible has become for our culture a ‘Great Code’, which we have followed unerringly in all our mythic arrangements of images in literature, poetry, and art. It is also the code which our culture, in its attempts to understand the art and myths of other cultures, inevitably projects upon them.
      Meanwhile, Heinrich Zimmer and Joseph Campbell delved into the Sanskrit and Pali canons of Hindu and Buddhist scripture, and discovered differently shaped narrative structures which arrange their images in ever-recurring cycles of time. (Although this view of time was already known to our culture in its ancient Bronze Age, the oncoming centuries of Christianity gradually obscured it). Due to cyclic time, the narrative structures of Hindu-Buddism, Campbell claimed, are O-shaped. Figures like Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva continually create, destroy, and restore the cosmos. And so the Buddha’s task, in contrast to Christ’s, is to find that one stilled point at the centre of time’s ever-swirling illusion.
      But, these two opposing views on time came to be further augmented by Mircea Eliade. In his bookThe Myth of the Eternal Return, he recognized the existence of another, more ancient mode of time, which he called ‘Mythical Time’. Like Zimmer and Campbell, Eliade had begun his studies in Hindu scriptures, but quickly moved beyond them to a broader analysis of all the world’s religions. He also delved into the shamanistic practises of Primitive cultures, whose beliefs may constitute the primordial origins of all religions. His analysis revealed a view on time decidedly different from Judæo-Christianity and Hindu-Buddhism, because ancient narratives arrange their images in a more remote ‘Mythical Time’ – a sacred and Eternal Time which transpires before and after linear history, and is closed off from time’s ever-recurring cycles.
      In Cosmogonic myths, a momentary Epiphany transpires, as the eternally Sacred is revealed at the beginnning of Creation or at the end of the Apocalypse. Meanwhile, in sacred Hero myths, a momentary Epiphany also transpires, but in the middle of linear or cyclic history, when the hero himself experiences a momentary death, rebirth, and awakening. What is more, the measures of linear or cyclic time are temporarily removed, as the hero momentarily re-enters the eternal Mythic Time. In short, during these brief moments, a timeless Epiphany transpires: the hero momentarily beholds the eternally Sacred.
      Such images of Epiphany constitute each myth’s most important moment. In our study, we shall have cause to refer to them, time and again, as Threshold Images. Typically, Threshold Images arise in the first few moments of a Creation myth, at the last few moments of an Apocalyptic myth, and at the nadir of a Hero myth. In sacred statuary and art, these Threshold Images are preserved for all time, where that moment of Epiphany is forever ‘frozen still’. And so, as we slowly regain the ancient language of images, we will learn how to ‘enter through’ this particular type of image.
      In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell developed a model of the hero-narrative as it recurrs in most if not all mythologies, naming it ‘the Monomyth’. With this important device, he was able to compare the narratives of many of the world’s mythologies. And in his attempt to encompass them all, he saw that, behind all the multifarious ‘masks of God’, there lies, ultimately, one visage – shared by all cultures, but ultimately inscrutible and unknown. Hence, the eternally Sacred, which is revealed time and again in the momentary Epiphanies of art and myth, must remain, per force, unnamed. Nevertheless, such a timeless Presence will be felt again and again each time an image is successfully ‘entered through’. As such, being called upon to name the unnameable, we may refer to it in these pages, variously, as the ancient Sacramentum, Mysterion, or even as ‘the Ancient One’.
      The iconologues of time, narrative, and the hero-task become keys that unlock the gates of, not only myth, but dreams as well. For myths and works of art have continually sought their source-imagery in dreams. Yet, by giving these fleeting apparitions more solid form, they have thereby elevated the dark mechanisms of dreamwork into the light of consciousness. Dreams, like myths, are also an arrangement of images in time, and unfold according to certain set narrative structures. In them, the dreamer is given some task to accomplish, and must cross over a dangerous life-threshold to complete it. And so, as Campbell concluded after a lifetime of research into mythology, “In myth... we enter the sphere of dream awake.” (12)
      In this way, Campbell slowly became conscious of the same deep accord which Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung had also detected between dreams and myth. For myths, in a more structured way, use the same symbols and narratives which arise, almost spontaneously, in dreams. “Imagery, especially the imagery of dreams,” Campbell remarked, “is the basis of mythology.”(13) And Eliade echoed this sentiment: “In the oneiric universe, we find again and again the symbols, the images, the figures and events of which mythologies are constituted.”(14)
      Hence, the ancient Image-Language silently speaks to us in the images of, not only dreams, but myths. And so myths must also be considered as arrangements of images where, ‘some primæval relic of humanity is still at work’; they too manifest the ‘mental antiquities’ and ‘older modes of thought’ characteristic of iconologic. Thus, among the discoveries of Nietzsche, Freud and Jung, among the various symbols, archetypes, condensations and displacements which arrange images into dreams, we must also include the mythic structures of task, narrative, and time discovered by Frye, Eliade, Zimmer, and Campbell.
       In recent times, there have also been certain artists and writers who, through the peculiar arrangements of images in their works, have betrayed a secret desire to seek out iconologic’s lost manner of thinking. Our inquiry into an ancient Image-Language would not be complete unless we also considered more recent works of art wherein the ancient tendencies still persist. And so, we shall have cause to call upon the works of certain twentieth century artists and writers, so as to illustrate the mythological and dream-like motifs of the ancient Image-Language. Among the artists who have pursued dream imagery in their works stand such Surrealist painters as Dalí and Magritte, as well as the more modern Visionary artists Ernst Fuchs and Johfra. Among the novelists who have crossed ancient myths in their more modern works stand Nikos Kazantzakis and Hermann Hesse. All have demonstrated in their works a gradual awakening and awareness of the ancient Image-Language, and the attempt to enter, once more, through the image.

V. Surrealist Logic

      Through his pioneering journey into the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud inspired a generation of Parisian artists in the 1920’s to undertake similar such voyages to this realm below consciousness – chronicalling in poetry, painting, theatre, and film their nightly wanderings into the dark world of dreams. In the end, Surrealism brought dreams and their peculiar manner of thinking more and more into our waking world, so that the ancient manner in which dream-images are arranged could become more immediately apparent.
      In a celebrated passage from the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), André Breton defined the surrealist image, citing the ideas of Pierre Reverdy:

      The image is a pure creation of the mind... born from the juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.The more the relationship is distant and true, the stronger the image will be – the greater its emotional impact and poetic reality. (15)

      The classic example of a surrealist image was taken from Lautréamont: “Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un parapluie.” (16) (“As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” ) In many Surrealist paintings we find evidence of these rencontres fortuites. In de Chirico: beside an attic nude torso lie a bunch of bananas; in Magritte: bourgeois gentlemen in bowler hats rain from the sky; and in Dalí: a grasshopper is pressed to the dreamer’s lips. The ‘patron saint of Surrealism’, Sigmund Freud, had previously recognized these fortuitous encounters in dreams, and christened them ‘condensations’. Through thestrange juxtaposition of objects in their paintings, accompanied by their underlying ‘condensations’, the Surrealists raised into consciousness an important iconologue identified by Freud – a means of arranging images in accord with the logic of dreams.

      In Magritte’s The Ladder of Fire (1939), we find another example of iconologic, as well as the iconologue that underlies the image’s strange arrangement. Here, a key, a rock, and a crumpled piece of paper are placed side by side, and each is fast afire. Within the world of Aristotlean logic, it is perfectly acceptable for a crumpled piece of paper to ignite afire. But only in the world of Surrealist logic may a rock and key also burst into flames.
      To displace fire’s combustible quality onto a rock and key is the poetic step par excellance that suddenly transports the viewer out of the Aristotlean constructs of reality and into Surreality. In the resulting disorder, the essential defining properties of objects shift. A rock, normally earthen, becomes fiery, such as in Magritte’s painted vision. And in the ever-metamorphosing world of dreams momentarily held still by Surrealist painters, liquid becomes solid, and solid, combustible. Thus, a key burns, a statue bleeds, and a bowl of fruit appears to be made of stone. Or, in Dalí’s celebrated Persistence of Memory, pocket watches soften, melt and turn into images of liquid time. Freud recognized the dream-logic at work here, and characterized it as ‘displacement’ – another essential iconologue identified by Freud, utilized by Surrealist painters, and thus, elevated into consciousness.
      It is the ‘fortuitous encounter’ between objects (condensation) or their qualities (displacement) that ushers us into the realm of dreams, because the relation that holds within the resultant image is more or less unconscious, and hence, in accord with a more ancient, mythopoeic mode of thinking. But, the more we look at Dalí or Magritte’s work, it becomes apparent that both artists preferred to use modern, day-to-day objects in their juxtapositions: bowler hats, umbrellas, pocket watches, and other petit bourgeois articles. Through the strange juxtapostion of these Herrenartikel, we see symbols of the type often encountered in dreams - dreams which, for Freud, had a hidden, sexual intent.
       In his chapter on ‘Representation by Symbols’ in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud focussed his analysis onto the petit bourgeois objects of his day, and saw Herr Biedermeier’s hats, umbrellas and neckties as phallic in nature:“All elongated objects, such as ...umbrellas (the opening of the last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ.” (17)As regards articles of clothing, woman’s hat can very often be interpreted with certainty as a gential organ, and moreover, as a man’s... In men’s dreams, a necktie often appears as a symbol for the penis.” (18) Meanwhile gnädige Frau’s sewing machine and other “complicated machinery and apparatus occuring in dreams stand for the genitals.” (19 )Hence, following the tradition initiated by Freud, these artists became preoccupied with ‘anti-bourgeois’ dreams revealing Herr Biedermeier’s hidden sexual wishes.
      Yet as Jung was able to later demonstrate, the source of our dream material is not only the personal unconscious, with its residue from our day-to-day encounters, but also the deeper, cultural strata of our collective unconscious. Dreams contain collective or cultural symbols which reveal, not only hidden and repressed sexual wishes, but more intricate and complex issues of life’s fulfilment and wholeness. Indeed, the symbols of our dreams may have a higher, more sacred purpose: to awaken Man to the presence of the Sacred in his life.

VI. The Visionary Art
of Fantastic Realism

      In Fuchs’ Moses Before the Burning Bush, we find another fine example where the ancient manner of image-thinking has been preserved in a modern work of art. Here, the Hebrew figure of Moses is depicted in Gothic style, but juxtaposed within the same picture is the face of the Buddha. On the left, within the burning bush, is the figure of Yahweh, and aside from the Jewish symbol of the menorah burning around him, he also possesses the Hindu iconographical feature of ‘four-handedness’, each hand gesturing as if with a distinctive Indian mudra.
      The first iconologue to be noted in this work is Fuchs’ juxtaposition of sacred symbols from different cultural traditions. Not only have traditional symbols of the sacred been evoked, but combined in new and unexpected ways. Such a combination allows us to think further through their antiquated forms, arriving at a new, more creative and comprehensive view onto the Sacred.
      While Surrealist painters began with petit bourgeois objects and, through their strange juxtaposition, created dream symbols from the personal unconscious (tinged with sexual associations); Visionary artists began with sacred symbols and created, through their strange juxtaposition, dream symbols from the deeper cultural matrix of the collective unconscious (with a halo of more sacred associations). Through his juxtaposition of different cultural symbols, Fuchs is able to elevate more ancient strata of the collective unconscious into our modern awareness – in particular, the ancient’s greater awareness of the Sacred.
      In the case where recognizable religious symbols are juxtaposed, a series of more sacred associations arise. Because, sacred symbols remain situated within their mythic contexts. As such, when two such symbols are juxtaposed, their associated myths are also evoked and, indeed, cross one another. At the one moment in time that is manifest in this painting, two different mythic narratives meet at their nadir. In Fuchs’ painting, we witness that moment of Epiphany when Yahweh manifest Himself to Moses in the form of a burning bush – while witnessing, simultaneously, the epiphanous moment when the Buddha finally broke through to Enlightenment.
      Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, calls upon and crosses exactly these two myths to illustrate the narrative pattern of the hero’s ‘separation’ from the world, his momentary ‘initiation’ into a sacred revelation, and his subsequent ‘return’ as he attempts to offer this revelation to the world: “The whole of the Orient,” Campbell writes, “has been blessed by the boon brought back by Gautama Buddha – his wonderful teaching of the Good Law [the Dharma]– just as the Occident has by the Decalogue of Moses.”(21) In Fuchs’ marvellous painting, we are able to witness how these two narratives meet at that nadir moment of Epiphany when the Wisdom and the Word, the Dharma and the Decalogue, were finally revealed.

VII. The ‘Immutible Face behind
all Religious Symbols’

      The displacement and condensation of various sacred symbols is able to expand our cultural horizon to such a degree that we eventually achieve a broader yet more unified vision of the Sacred. In the writings of Nikos Kazantzakis and Hermann Hesse this higher, more culturally diverse and yet unified vision of the Holy also appears.
      For example, in his autobiography, Kazantzakis describes an event in his youth while visiting the Temple of Knossos in his homeland of Crete. While at the temple he has a most fortuitous encounter with an old Parisian abbé:

      We stopped at a square column of glazed plaster, at the top of which was incised the sacred sign: the double-edged axe. The abbé joined his hands together, bent his knee for a moment, and moved his lips as though in prayer.
      I was astonished. “What - are you praying?” I asked him.
      “Of course I am praying, my young friend. Every race and every age gives God its own mask. But behind all the masks, in every age and every race, is always the same never-changing God.”
      He fell silent, but after a moment: “We have the cross as our sacred sign; your most ancient ancestors had the double-edged axe. But I push aside the ephemeral symbols and discern the same God behind both the cross and the doubled-edged axe, discern him and do obeiscance.”
      I was very young at that time. On that day I did not understand, but years later my mind was able to contain those words and make them bear fruit. Then I too began to discern the eternal immutable face of God behind all religious symbols. (22)

      Meanwhile, in his novel The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse also pursues this ‘immutible face’ behind all the masks of God. In his allegorical novel, Hesse creates an age-old imaginary game which becomes an extended metaphor for the quest after bliss. In the fabled province of Castilia, a symbolic language akin to Chinese pictograms, musical notation, and mathematical formulæ was developed, which allowed the artistic, scientific and philosophical ideas from various cultures to be faithfully translated into one universal script. A form of meditation was added to the manipulation of these symbols, creating a kind of quest after ever higher and more encompassing combinations of symbols. This then evolved into a traditional, time-honoured game practiced among various orders and leagues, and “...represented an elite, symbolic form of seeking for perfection, a sublime alchemy, an approach to that Mind which beyond all images and multiplicities is one within itself – in other words, to God.” (23)
      A game might begin with a theme from a Bach fugue, or a sentence from Leibniz or the Upanishads, or a mathematical formula, and from there, depending on the talents of the player, evolve so as to include related themes from various other arts and disciplines – seeking always the underlying unity among this multiplicity. Of particular interest to our quest for iconologic, which resembles the Glass Bead Game in many ways, is the fact that at one point in the novel Hesse’s protagonist realizes

      ...that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the centre, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. ...Every transformation of a myth or religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, [he] realized in that fleeting moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where... holiness is forever being created. (24)

      As with Kazantzakis’ abbé, so here, the glass bead game player recognizes that the multiplicity of sacred symbols, when combined with one another, leads beyond their surface imagery to a much deeper awareness of the Sacramentum they all share at their origin. Our quest for the ancient Image-Language may be likened to the Glass Bead Game, with the exception that it concerns itself exclusively with images of the Divine, and seeks in dreams, art, and myth the means by which these images may be arranged and entered through so as to lead us ever further inward, into an experience of the Sacred at life’s centre.
      Hence, the ancient Image-Language remains manifest, in our day, through Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung’s researches into dreams as a more ancient manner of thinking. Myths, as well, preserve these ancient structures, as Eliade, Campbell, Zimmer, and Frye have discovered. Finally, through works of sacred and Visionary art, the more ancient manner of thinking has been preserved into modern times. By their Surrealist juxtapositions and Fantastic combinations, these artists have revealed, what Kazantzakis called ‘the eternal immutable face of God behind all religious symbols’, and what Hesse further invoked as ‘the interior of the cosmic mystery, where... holiness is forever being created...’
      Invoking these modern dream-explorers and mythologians as our guides, we may now undertake our journey into the dark, chthonic world where art, myth, and dream interfuse.

FOOTNOTES

1. Plato, ‘Sophist’ 266c, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen LXXI, Princeton University Press,
1961, p. 1014.
2. ‘The Gospel of Philip’ 67:17, The Nag Hammadi Library, edited by James M.
Robinson, Harper & Row, 1978, p. 140.
3. ‘Corpus Hermeticum’ IV.11, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the
Latin Asclepius, translated by Brian Copenhave, Cambridge University Press,
1992, p. 17.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human all too Human, vol I, 13, cited by C. G. Jung
Psychology and Religion C. W. 11, par 89, translated by R. F. C. Hull,
Bollingen XX, Princeton University Press.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, cited by Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse,
edited by Joseph Campbell, Bollingen XI, Princeton University Press, 1948, p. 310
6. “Everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds ‘a call’ anymore.” Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by A. Hofstadter, Harper Colophon, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 208.
7. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Translated by J. Strachey,
Penguin, 1976, p. 700.
8. For example, this excerpt from one of Freud’s letters to Jung: “Dear Friend,
...It is remarkable that on the same evening that I formally adopted you as an
eldest son, annointing you as my successor and crown prince – in partibus
infidelium – that then and there you should have divested me of my paternal
dignity... I therefore don once more my horn-rimmed paternal spectacles and
warn my dear son to keep a cool head... I also shake my wise gray locks...”
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela
Jaffé, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, Vintage Random House, 1989,
p. 362.
9. Ibid., p. 188.
10 .C. G. Jung, (C. W. 8), Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, translated by
R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen XX, Princeton University Press, p. 247.
11. C. G. Jung, (C. W. 11, par. 88), Psychology and Religion, translated by
R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen XX, Princeton University Press.
12. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Penguin, 1968, p. 671.
13. Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, Bollongen Series C, Princeton University
Press, 1974, back cover.
14. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries:
The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities,
translated by Philip Mairet, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 14.
15. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by R. Seaver and H. Lane,
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1969, p. 20.
16. Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, cited in Jean-Luc Rispail, Les surréalists:
Une génération entre rêve et l’action, Gallimard, 1991, pg. 34, 85.
17. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 470.
18. Ibid., p. 473.
19. Ibid., p. 473.
20. See for example, Ernst Fuchs de Draeger, Draeger, 1977;
The Fantastic Art of Vienna, Alessandra Comini, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978;
Inner Visions, Nevill Drury, Penguin Arkana, 1979;
Die Phantasten, Gesellschaft bildender Künstler Österreichs, Künstlerhaus,1990.
21. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen XVII, Princeton
University Press, 1949, p. 35.
22. Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, Faber and Faber, 1965, p. 150.
23. Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, translated by Richard and Clara
Winston, Picador Classics, 1969, p. 40.
24. Ibid., p. 119.