Ekaterina Dice about the “small” tradition of European culture. The Family in the Mirror of Mary Poppins

the narrative is constructed from the perspective of the killer or the victim. One of the side effects of this identification is that the novel can be used as a manual on initiation, provided that its characters represent archetypes of initiates and initiators, that is, they show patterns of their behavior.

He locked himself in a closet with his faithful
And with them there he distilled from flasks
Compounds of all kinds of crap.
There they called silver "lily"
“Leo” means gold, and their mixture means a connection in marriage.
Good obtained by fire,
The “Tsarina” was washed in a refrigerated tank,
A rainbow coating was deposited in it.
People were treated with this amalgam,
Without checking whether he was cured,
Who turned to our balm.

“There they called silver “lily”, / “Lion” gold, and their mixture was a bond in marriage.” - easily recognizable lines for those who have read “Synchrony”, where Jung, using statistical methods, finds out the validity of the astrological assumption about the connection of the sun and moon in the horoscopes of 400 married couples.

Lilia was the name of Conchis's lover in his youth, his wife, Lilia de Seitas, and one of the twin sisters with whom Nicholas had an affair, that is, three different women corresponding to the three phases of the moon, three goddesses and three alchemical stages. Lily is part Lilith, Adam's first wife, and part "High Priestess" from the Tarot deck, associated with the goddess Isis.

“Now it dawned on me that the lamp had been placed behind me to illuminate her appearance; and the appearance was stunning. She must have been dressed in the secular fashion of 1915: a dark blue silk evening shawl over a light, ivory-colored dress that tapered down to mid-calf. The tight hem made her mince, which added to her gracefulness...” This girl reconstructed the reality of forty years ago, appearing as the reincarnation of Lilia, the deceased bride of Maurice Conchis.

This is how Persephone, the light-illuminated Queen of the Moon, appeared to the adherents of the Eleusinian Mysteries. “She extended her hand, I shook it. Cold, motionless palm. I touched a ghost... you sigh for such coolness in the summer heat... Incredibly pale. It doesn’t seem to happen at all in the air.” Lilia Conchis is presented as suffering from schizophrenia. She, like Nicholas, goes through her own path on this island of initiations and villa of mysteries.

Bonnard has many paintings where the girl is in the bathtub - shrouded in foam, like Aphrodite, or standing in front of the mirror, admiring her reflection, like Psyche. As a rule, his model was his wife Martha. She is also depicted in the painting “Nude in a Bath” (1941-46), which Bonnard began painting a year before Martha’s death and continued to work on it for five years, finishing a year before his own death.

The timing of the painting and its content correspond to the approximate description that Fowles gives us. Martha Bonnard, who spent several hours a day in the bathroom, which some art historians consider a sign of her mental illness (Martha suffered from paranoia), is the prototype of Alison, who climbs into Nicholas’s bathtub, barely having time to meet him. The second painting described by Fowles, with a girl standing with her back to the viewer, is possibly Nude in Front of a Mirror (1931).

There is a sense of continuity in it both with the painting by the impressionist Berthe Morisot “Psyche” and with the engraving of Count F. Tolstoy for the poem “Darling” by I. Bogdanovich, a poetic retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

The eternal femininity that appears in Bonnard’s paintings comes from here, from the story of how a mortal girl became a goddess. The biography of the aristocratic artist, who married a girl from a simple family, echoes the biography of Nicholas, one of the “ruling 100 thousand,” as he says about himself, who descended like a Greek god to a simple Australian woman with a funny accent and neglected the sophisticated Lily. Ultimately, his choice is influenced not by social conventions, which he discarded along with the now unnecessary Persona, but by myths and archetypes, which turn out to be more important. Ultimately, all of Fowles's texts are about this - that mythology wins. And even in the novel “The Collector,” which can be understood as a detective story about kidnapping, and as a retelling of the ancient myth about Hades and Persephone, and as a story about an evil magician and “a butterfly, a soul, Psyche.”

The blonde Miranda, abducted by Clegg, is compared by him to a butterfly, Pale Clouded Yellow, belonging to the pierid family.

It is interesting that pierides are one of the designations of the Muses. Dying in a dungeon, tortured by a butterfly collector who decided to switch to girls, Miranda becomes a symbol of Anima, Psyche and Persephone.

In his classic work “On the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” Carl Gustav Jung writes the following: “Where do we get the courage to call this elven spirit “Anima”? After all, “Anima” is the name given to the soul, thereby denoting something miraculous and immortal. However, this was not always the case. We must not forget that this is a dogmatic idea of ​​the soul, the purpose of which is to capture and conjure something unusually spontaneous and vital. The German word for soul, Seele, through its Gothic form Saiwalo, is closely related to the Greek aiolos, which means mobile, iridescent - something like a butterfly (Greek psyhe), flying from flower to flower, living on honey and love. .

Jung gives the butterfly the ability to live with the help of honey and love. Taking into account this property, we can interpret the meaning of the names of the characters in the novel “The Magician” - Nicholas’s friend and confidant - Dimitriadis, nicknamed “Meli” (honey) and Alison Kelly, who make up an androgynous couple who helps Erfa find the meaning of life. Alison and Melie have names that go back through honey to Jung's Anime/Butterfly/Soul. The girl’s name refers to the Alysson maritime flower, which has a pronounced honey aroma that spreads for meters around, and Meli sounds like “honey” in Greek.

It seems to us that the appearance of the myth of Cupid and Psyche in the novel “The Collector” and the endowment of the main character of this novel with the traits of a butterfly valued by the kidnapper goes back to the paragraph we quoted above from the work “On the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”.

In K.-G. Jung, we also find the origins of the image of Nicholas, which allows us to compare Fowles' three characters - Nicholas, Alison and Lily with three ancient archetypes - Adam, Eve and Lilith.

In the preface to The Magician, Fowles writes: “There is a hidden pun in the surname I gave him. As a child, I pronounced the letters th as "f", and Erfe actually means Earth, Earth..." Nicholas repeatedly repeats that he graduated from Oxford, and several times says that he came to Conchis just for a glass of water. Conchis is Nicholas's real teacher, and Conchis studied with Jung.

In Misterium Conjunctionis, Jung writes about Adam: “in the interpretation of the Haggadah, his name is derived from the word adamah, earth.” Here we see a parallel with the surname of Nicholas Erfe, which personally meant “land” for Fowles. Jung also cites one of the English riddles of the 14th century, dating back to the Anglo-Saxon “Dialogue between Saturn and Solomon.” It sounds like this:

“Question from an Oxford master to his student: From what was Adam created? - Of the eight things: the first is earth, the second is fire, the third is wind, the fourth is fog, the fifth is air with which he can speak and think, the sixth is the dew with which he sweats, the seventh is the water that he thirsts, the eighth - salt, thanks to which Adam's tears are salty.

If Nicholas is likened to Adam: “here, as on most of the beaches of Fraxos, there was a captivating feeling that you were the first person to be here... the very first person on Earth,” then Alison plays the role of Eve (according to Jung, the Anima archetype means life in all its manifestations , and the name Eve means “life”), Lily, according to consonance, gets the role of Lilith. All this is quite conditional, because, as Conchis said: “She is not a real Lily... But she does not play the role of Lily either.”

In some ways, Fowles's poetics are comparable to René Magritte's famous painting This Is Not a Pipe, which depicts a pipe.

When we get used to the masterfully woven fabric of his texts and begin to associate ourselves with the characters, then at some point we understand that this is not written about us. The real essence of the master’s works is made up of masterfully shuffled archetypes, those same Tarot cards that he does not have in order, but are whimsically scattered, forming new meanings. But when we come to this thought, it turns out that these texts and their initiatory potential begin to work in our lives. Unbeknownst to ourselves, we realize that we have been initiated by Fowles' text. This is Lily, and this is not Lily. In the space of myth, where such a statement is possible, formal logic with its truth and falsity of statements does not work. Fowles's characters are the Magician, the Anima and the Persona, they are just heroes, and they are each of us.

........................................ .......................

The Magus, in Russian translation "Magus". This translation of the name does not seem correct to us, because it distorts the meanings associated with the magician.

On the esoteric roots of Hesse's Jung-inspired work, see Serano M. Jung and Hesse: The Hermetic Circle. Belgrade: “The Blue Rider”, 1993.

Moreno Ya. Psychodrama. M., 2008. P. 16.

Right there. pp. 16-17.

Another Fowles novel, The Collector, features the kidnapper Ferdinand and the artist Miranda, who calls him Caliban, which in Shakespeare's character system means "monster."

Fowles J. The Magus. A revised version. N.Y.: Laurel, 1985. P. 66.

Jung, K.-G. Memories, dreams, reflections. http://lib.ru/PSIHO/JUNG/memdreamrefs.txt (11/10/2011)

Goethe I.V. Faust. M., 1960. P.139.

Fowles John. Magus Per. B. Kuzminsky. URL: http://lib.ru/FAULS/mag.txt

For some reason, in the Russian translation he became Charles Weston.

Jung K.G. About the archetypes of the collective unconscious./ Jung K.G. Archetype and symbol. Moscow: “Renaissance”, 1991. P. 115.

Fowles J. Preface.//Fowles J. Magus. Per. from English B.N. Kuzminsky. M.: AST Publishing House LLC, 2004. P. 10.

Gruenbaum. Judisch-deutsche Crestomatie, S. 180. Cited. by Jung K.G. Decree. op. P.388.

Jung K.G. Decree. op. P.371.

Right there. P.65.

Over the course of 2000 years, since the formation of Christianity as an institution, there have been various secret movements that must be considered not individually, but in the aggregate: as a single, integral line. That's what we're talking about.

Catherine Dice is a researcher whose area of ​​interest is, to the unaccustomed ear, somewhat exotic. She is a specialist in the mystery tradition in European culture and in the problems of geopoetics (and, in addition, in modern Russian and Ukrainian literature). At one time, having graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities, she defended an innovative dissertation there with an unexpected title: “The Small Tradition of European Culture in the Work of John Fowles” (later the dissertation formed the basis of the book “John Fowles and the Mystery Tradition”).

The discussion was about how and why the work of this English writer - quite a massive one, published in millions of copies - reflected the “other”, “unofficial”, “small” line of European culture, which has existed parallel to Christianity for two thousand years. This tradition, which ultimately received the name mystery, includes a diverse range of phenomena from pagan movements to completely Christian-looking orders and sects.

For at least two millennia, the question of the gender identity of God was not relevant for European culture. If the elder hypostasis of God is the Father, if the younger one is the Son, if it is spiritual, then the Holy Spirit, but not the Soul. A woman could only give birth to God - as, sorry for the secular parallel, in the famous poem by the Belarusian poet Maria Martysevich “Give birth to the President.” Not “become president,” but give birth!

Now Catherine’s research work is to identify in modern, especially popular literature, traces of once secret, and now increasingly obvious knowledge: first of all, these are references to Gnostic texts, to the experience of various spiritual orders, to alchemy. The presence of these traces, the researcher believes, is not accidental and indicates profound changes in the cultural state of the Western world: the mystery tradition, once pushed to the periphery of culture, is now increasingly shifting towards its center.

I couldn’t miss the opportunity to ask Catherine about how she sees modern cultural processes and what they, in her opinion, mean.

– What kind of path, Catherine, led you from Fowles to the study of the secret tradition of Western culture?

“When I started working on my dissertation on Fowles, I, like everyone else, thought that Fowles was a postmodernist. But he did not fit into the postmodernist scheme. And not only to her. I tried, while remaining on a post-structuralist position, to analyze its plots and characters. It turned out that in each of his works there is a magician (priest, initiator), an initiator and the true beloved of the hero, who is contrasted with his false lovers.

This is clearly not postmodernism. But then what?

My supervisor, Igor Grigorievich Yakovenko, proposed the name “small tradition” as a working term. It is, of course, very conditional. There is such a term in ethnology: “small tradition” refers to the cultural traditions of small peoples, for example, the North. But the tradition that is meant is completely different. In terms of scale and importance, it is by no means “small” - especially now, if you look at the processes that began in the twentieth century. And if it is now gaining momentum, will we rename it “big” in twenty years? More precisely, to talk about the mystery tradition.

– What would you call, as opposed to mystery, the dominant tradition in culture?

– This is an official tradition. The fact is that for about two thousand years - since the formation of Christianity as an institution - there have been various secret currents that must be considered not individually, but in the aggregate: as a single, integral line.

If we adhere to this view, the history of this period, especially European history, looks completely different. The supposed fragmentation of the mystery tradition is due to the fact that it is simply advantageous for the official tradition to present a competitor as something fragmentary, insignificant and, indeed, “small”. In this regard, nothing has changed since the time of Irenaeus. The tendency towards fraud is the same.

Once at the conference “Russia and Gnosis,” a representative of the official tradition spoke in the sense that, firstly, Gnosticism, by and large, never existed, and secondly, there is no need to show that this is some kind of single, big line , trend, are all separate, marginal, unrelated phenomena. The point is that they are connected to each other. And it is impossible to understand the Templars without understanding the Khlysty, Freemasons, Rosicrucians...

– But these are all movements within the framework of the official tradition. So, do the official and mystery traditions have a common root?

- Essentially, yes. This is a synthesis from the same elements - two different wholes. These two traditions compete with each other because they are very close, like cousins. Often, which tradition should be attributed to what is a matter of interpretation.

For example, Francis Bacon’s wonderful aphorism, “Knowledge is the power,” or “Knowledge is power!” can also be understood as the Gnostic call “Gnosis is the power”, that is, all power is in gnosis - the true knowledge of the elects. We are talking only about interpretation, about translation. After all, the words “gnosis”, “knowledge”, “knowledge” - after all, have a common Indo-European root

– What is the dividing line between traditions?

– I think in the space of anthropology. They correspond to different types of people. From a psychological point of view, a representative of the mystery tradition is a depressive type. From the point of view of the history of religion, this is a Gnostic.

The main idea for the Gnostics is that there are two divine principles. One of them is, relatively speaking, good, but it does not interfere in earthly affairs. The other is not exactly evil, but unreasonable. It does evil not intentionally, but out of inability and thoughtlessness. The world - his creation - is hopelessly and irreparably bad. This is a depressing picture of the world.

The earth, they believe, was created by an imperfect god, the Demiurge, and it is he who is responsible for all evil. This is how the question of theodicy is resolved here - the main question of Christianity, which has not yet been resolved in it: if God is good, then why is there so much evil around? For the Gnostics, there is nothing strange here: the world, as they believe, is generally mired in evil - the Demiurge, in principle, could not create anything good.

As we know, in history there were no states that were based on the Gnostic line. True, in Bulgaria the Bogomils were in power for a time - but not for long. And not by chance. The point is that this is impossible. This is already a civilizational question: the state cannot be based on the idea - fundamental to the mystery tradition - that everything is bad and will always be bad, and in this sense, here on earth we cannot change anything. That is, if you think in psychoanalytic categories, a depressive state is impossible. And a state, say, manic-depressive or paranoid, is quite possible.

But two traditions are also two different positions of a person in existence. For representatives of the official tradition, and they are the majority, their own religious feeling and participation in a religious sacrament as a person capable of influencing something is, in principle, unimportant.

In Christianity and other official religions, ecstatic feelings are directed primarily to the priest: he, the minister, is responsible for magic, for turning wine into blood, wafers into flesh... Ordinary Christians can neither perform miracles nor use magical states at all and capabilities. They need a mediator.

In the mystery tradition (which Protestantism in its most modernized forms seems to be approaching), more religious responsibility is placed on the individual. He himself can perform the ritual, baptize children...

Let us remember the conflict between Peter and Paul and Simon the Magus. Simon the Magician flew, and his flights attracted a large number of spectators. He did what - within the framework of the official tradition - a person could not do: he performed miracles. Simon the Magician did not call himself God, he was a man - but at the same time he flew! And what, according to legend, are Peter and Paul doing? “They are praying for him to fall.” Simon the Magician falls and is broken. In my opinion, this story is very typical of the relationship between the official and mystery traditions.

I would add: in alchemy, man himself transforms matter. That is, the alchemist does something completely impossible from the point of view of a representative of the official tradition: he tries to do the work of God himself, the Creator of the world. Essentially, he becomes godlike in some way - in something that can be expressed in material form.

– Do you think that the official tradition has come to dominate the European historical and intellectual space due to the fact that it has a more positive and constructive attitude to life?

– And also because there are fewer people who are able to accept all the horror of the world than those who want to think differently.

– As far as I understand, the mystery tradition, having suffered a defeat in a certain sense, did not go away, but went into hidden forms of existence. You wrote that in the twentieth century it became more and more significant, going from elite circles to the mass reader of Dan Brown’s books. In what forms is it alive now?

– First of all, it is worth mentioning mass literature, popular writers today: Pelevin, Sorokin - if we talk about Russia; the same Fowles with his millions of copies, Joyce, Hesse, Eco, Pavic, Pamuk...

In the twentieth century there were three outbursts of the mystery tradition - perhaps this is due to general cultural processes. The first wave - both in the West and, a little later, in Russia - was associated with the First World War and with the understanding that a person was becoming vulnerable and vulnerable. The surge of mysticism was powerful. I think that war with the use of new technical means of mass destruction - that is, indirect murder - affects religious feelings.

First of all, a person begins to feel greater responsibility for himself, for his destiny. He no longer shifts it to someone else. They say that poetry is impossible after Auschwitz. Likewise, religion in its traditional forms after the First World War turned out to be impossible.

Please note: in the 60s, many different social and scientific revolutions began. An example of a social revolution is the sexual one; as an example of a scientific one - topographical (the predominant interest in history and time gives way to an interest in geography and space), in Western humanities it is known as the “spatial turn”. Let’s say that cultural studies now is very much cultural geography.

At first glance, it seems as if these revolutions are not connected with each other. But everything is much more complicated. I call it "The Return of the Great Goddess." Let's say the sexual revolution is the legitimization of femininity. Traditions appear in different modes. The social mode of manifestation of the official tradition is the oppressed position of women. And in the mystery tradition, gender is either not very important, or women have some advantage.

In the end, we can say that the mystery tradition goes back to the Neolithic cult of the Great Goddess, the Goddess of the earth, and the official one is a modified cult of the God of the sky. After all, even “Our Father” begins with the words: “...like you are in heaven.” Throughout history, belief in the Sky God and belief in the Earth Goddess competed with each other. More precisely, they coexisted. And in the twentieth century, from the 60s, the religion of the Goddess breaks out.

The third wave has been going on since the early 90s. This is the last surge of the mystery tradition in the twentieth century. He seems to be finally legitimizing it. The first surge was, in general, secret. Until 1905, none of the same Symbolists could say that they belonged to another, non-Orthodox faith: in Russia the law of non-departure from Orthodoxy was in force. Those born Lutherans or Jews could remain so, but it was impossible to switch from Orthodoxy to another religion - until 1905, this was punishable by hard labor.

That is, Marina Tsvetaeva could not directly tell everyone that she participated in secret rituals...

– Did you really participate?

– Based on her poems, this can be assumed. And Chekhov, for example, has a story that can be interpreted from the point of view of Gnosticism: “Fish Love,” about how Karas fell in love with Sonechka. Sonechka is obviously a Gnostic Sophia. So, Chekhov could not speak otherwise than by allegory that he was a Gnostic.

– Was he a Gnostic?!

– He was an anti-Christian. Dislike of Christianity is quite often, although not necessarily, combined with a love of mysticism as its competitor. Yes, many Russian writers were Gnostics. For example, Dostoevsky.

- What did this mean?

– First of all, in a typically Gnostic worldview. Then, in heroines like Sonechka Marmeladova - pay attention: Sofia again! Moreover, she was a fallen woman, and the Gnostic Sophia was called “the fallen aeon.” It is no coincidence that Simon Magus, as her embodiment, took with him a prostitute bought from a brothel.

– Was Chekhov himself aware of this, or was he unconsciously reproducing cultural matrices?

- At least he could know about it. At that time, Latin was taught in grammar schools; one could learn about Gnosticism from available sources - from the anti-Gnostic writings of the Church Fathers, Irenaeus of Lyons; from alchemical treatises, where Gnostic ideas are also presented.

It is known that 18-year-old Pushkin really wanted to be accepted into the Freemasons. But they didn’t take him. However, many of his works contain Masonic symbols: a dagger, “and the brothers will give us the sword”... You can read more about this in the works of Vsevolod Sakharov, dedicated to Freemasonry in Russian culture of the 19th century. It often happened that representatives of the mystery tradition, if they could not or did not want to express their thoughts openly, turned them into literature, especially children's literature. As a result, by the time they reached adulthood, children could already choose which tradition was closer to them.

If a flying man is mentioned somewhere, rest assured: this is all a mystery tradition. "Peter Pan", for example. Or Mary Poppins. There is also a flying nanny!

Pamela Travers was actually a student of Gurdjieff. And she was indignant, by the way, that “Mary Poppins” is called a book for children. Apparently, the fact that babies can talk to animals and know the language of plants while they are lying in the cradle is not just a fairy tale. Gurdjieff just had the idea that a person corresponds to himself only when he is born, in childhood - later he turns into a machine. And we need to make him a man again from a machine. Well, it looks like this is what she had in mind.

The same Andersen is pure alchemy. I myself am surprised when I look at children’s fairy tales through the eyes of a researcher of esotericism: everything there is so frank that it is unclear why every third person in our country does not understand alchemy? (Laughs)

The mystery tradition is not called that for nothing. It comes from the ancient mysteries. They contained a ban on written presentation - largely connected, probably, with the fact that few could write and read; but also with the fact that, having been written down, secret knowledge could get to the profane and be distorted - it was assumed that oral transmission, in terms of preservation, was more reliable.

Let us remember Apuleius and his “Metamorphoses,” and at the same time his rhetorical speech “Apology, or On Magic,” where he tries to dismiss accusations that he was a magician. One example. Apuleius, as a rhetorician, carried with him an image of the god Mercury. So, he lets slip that the Mercury, made especially for him, was made not from the type of wood prescribed for such cases, but from ebony.

The ebony tree in the mystery tradition is a very important symbol: it is associated with both the black Madonnas and the Ark of the Covenant... Mercury was the patron saint of not only rhetoricians, but also alchemists. Alchemy was already known in the time of Apuleius. Showing the figurine as the patroness of rhetoricians, he in fact, perhaps, showed another - the one that patronized alchemists. It’s just that none of those present at the trial had ever seen such a figurine.

So, in “Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass” and in the “Apology” elements of the mystery tradition are encrypted. But in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish this recording from ordinary rhetorical speech or from the novel as a genre. The speech that has reached us cannot be the same as what he delivered in court, if only because it takes much longer than he was allowed to speak. He was finishing it.

I suspect that Apuleius inserted fragments of secret knowledge there that were not there when he pronounced it in court - and thus brought ancient Greek alchemy to us. By the way, Jung’s student Marie-Louise von Franz wrote about her. Here is one of the oldest examples of how the mystery tradition is presented in literature, and one that is precisely dated. There are more recent examples - say, “The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.”

And in the twentieth century this is already becoming common. That is, it is difficult to be a famous writer if you know nothing about demiurges. In Ukraine, Vladimir Eshkilev even published the magazine “Pleroma”. One of the issues was designed as an anthology of Ukrainian literature, which included many modern authors - almost everyone who wrote in Ukraine in the late 90s. And this special issue of Pleroma was called “The Return of the Demiurges.”

I have already written about the fact that the culture of Russian rockers is related to the mystery tradition - more likely to be singer-songwriters than listeners, who, as a rule, do not understand what the songs are really about.

– But we are now talking about people of the 20th century: from Fowles to Russian rockers, who are generally our contemporaries, cultural brethren and studied in Soviet schools. Why do they, formed by the official tradition, need elements of the mysterious? What are they looking for there?

– We live in a heterogeneous world. It contains both of these traditions, inextricably linked. Why do great writers, especially novelists, often turn to the mystery tradition? A novel is, in principle, a reflection of the whole world in its entirety. And in the world there is both.

– Is this a desire to restore integrity?

– Rather, it’s like this: a certain, always existing, but hidden tendency becomes obvious. In fact, many people relate to this tradition by nature. If a tradition turns out to be illegal, they either convince themselves that they are not, or they still quietly engage in it.

Now we live in a post-Christian, secular era, but people still need to believe in something. In fact, I think that this is a turning point era, no matter in what terms we talk about it: “Kali Yuga”, “age of Aquarius”... Relatively speaking, modern times have ended. We, however, don’t quite understand this yet. And some fundamentally different big stage began. Naturally, this is connected with the interaction of a person with a computer, and with technical devices in general.

– And does this have anything to do with the fate of the mystery tradition?

– I don’t rule out an indirect relationship. I think the spread of the Internet played a role here - with its help, the collective unconscious is replaced, so to speak, by the “collective conscious.” For example, many people note, and I do too, how posts on the same topic appear in a row in a friend feed independently of each other.

Even the concept of “friend tape rhyme” appeared. Or spouses (current or former) write posts almost simultaneously, and while in different cities. This is synchrony, that is, the coincidence of the material and spiritual plans of human existence, which K.-G wrote about. Jung.

In addition, it has become easier for people to find like-minded people. Perhaps the mystics went on a kind of offensive because the conditions of human existence have changed. Here one mystic is born per thousand people - and how will he live in a world where there is no Internet, airplanes, and so on? He will see another one like him once a year. And here - please: LJ community, VKontakte group or Facebook. And communicate for your health! - regardless of your place of residence.

– How long ago has the mystery tradition become a subject of research? To what extent is this even scientifically understood?

– In the West, research into esotericism began quite a long time ago. Science, after all, follows in its development the processes taking place in society: writers started, scientists follow them. There are authority figures in this field - for example, Francis Yates. Students at universities may well be taught, say, the Tarot - that is, not as a magical practice, but as the history of a cultural form.

Here, as always, we are a little behind - now you can already imagine a special course on the same Tarot, for example, at Moscow State University, but 20 years ago this was completely impossible.

-Who else besides you is doing this? Is there any school, research group, or anyone in general that you could consider like-minded people?

– If we talk about researchers of Gnosticism, then these are either academic scientists, religious scholars, for example, Evgeny Afonasin from Novosibirsk or Nikolay Shaburov from the Russian State University for the Humanities, or enthusiastic translators who gather around online communities.

I have my favorite authors, for example, Anton Antipenko with his book “The Mythology of the Goddess”, Elena Glukhova with articles on the influence of Rosicrucianism on the poetry of the Silver Age, Yuri Khalturin with research on Masonic symbolism. Previously, one of these groups was the circle of authors of the magazine “Magic Mountain”, which indirectly grew out of an esoteric salon located in Yuzhinsky Lane. There are authors of the Delphis magazine circle; regular events are held in the White Clouds store and cultural center. But this is all quite fragmented.

– As far as I know, you have developed a new approach to text research...

– I identified plots that are characteristic of the mystery tradition and go back to the secret knowledge of antiquity. Based on this list of plots, it is easier to trace the relationships between seemingly unrelated texts and generally understand what they are about. That is, let's say you have the story of Melicent, Rostand's "Princess of Dreams", who a group of young people go in search of. If you do not compare her golden hair with the golden fleece, it is not clear what is happening in this text. And the history of the Golden Fleece is an alchemical history.

– How do you see ways for further research into the literature of the mystery tradition? What problems remain to be solved?

– First of all, we need to describe history in general, in particular the history of literature. And rethink everything and everyone, starting with major writers and major historical phenomena. Some things are still incomprehensible, if you do not take into account the mysterious side. Thinking about the waves of esotericism in the twentieth century, I realized that many Soviet projects, Soviet history in general, even some details of everyday life, can be understood in a Gnostic way.

For example, the traditional Gnostic idea that the world is a prison and the body is a prison. Stalin's repressions - that is, when quite a lot of people innocently end up in prison - are quite consistent with the Gnostic sense of the world and the body as a prison. If you look closely, the Bolsheviks had a lot in common with the esotericists - it’s not for nothing that their symbols are so similar: say, a five-pointed star - a pentagram...

Or, for example, where did the famous motto come from: “Lenin lived, Lenin is alive, Lenin will live”? It is possible that from one of the interpretations of the name Yahweh as an anagram of the phrase “I was, am and will be,” or from the phrase inscribed on the wall of the temple of the ancient goddess: “I, Isis, am everything that was, is or will be.” That is why the communist motto was so fascinating, because in it Lenin was likened to God, and in the form that was familiar to our ancestors.

What about the Soviet “fight against philistinism”? I had friends who threw their father’s priceless collection of African masks and sculptures into the street: they fought against philistinism! They threw out mahogany tables... Why did they fight him? If we are within the framework of the Gnostic understanding of the world, they fought with evil matter...

– You have three main areas of interest: mystery tradition, geopoetics and modern Russian and Ukrainian literature. Are they related?

- I think yes. Ukrainian literature interested me mainly because of the Stanislavsky or Ivano-Frankivsk phenomenon, and primarily because of Yuri Andrukhovych. He is essentially a follower of Fowles.

Besides Andrukhovych, on the modern literary map of Ukraine. I generally consider him a Gnostic. True, he is, so to speak, a spontaneous Gnostic, for he is not at all interested in the ideas of Gnosticism. But you can be a gnostic or an alchemist without even understanding what it is. Remember: “Every soul is by nature a Christian.” But there are also souls that are Gnostic in nature.

The heroes of Sergei Zhadan are akin to the gospel sinners, tax collectors and harlots. These are alcoholics, drug dealers, bandits, representatives of medium-sized businesses, prostitutes, hookers, American preachers, smugglers. You don’t expect any truths from Zhadan’s heroes, and yet it’s impossible to tear yourself away from these works. They draw you in, and you catch yourself not so much in the fact that you begin to sympathize with his heroes (although they, of course, deserve pity above all), but in the fact that you begin to be interested in them.

As for geopoetics, it is certainly associated with the “return of the Great Goddess”; It is not without reason that one of her incarnations is the Hellenic Gaia. This is the field of philosophy: the philosophy of space, which was invented in the late 70s by Kenneth White, a Frenchman of Scottish origin, essayist and poet. Important things were happening in cultural history at this time. White once realized that technocratic civilization was leading the world to the abyss, and that a philosophy was needed that would return man to nature.

It is characteristic that on the website of the Scottish Center for Geopoetics, in the definition of the concept “geopoetics”, the words are heard that it is “deeply critical of the Western way of thinking and action that has existed for the last 2500 years”, that is, in fact, to (in the broad sense ) Christian civilization.

When Kenneth White invented the concept of "geopoetics", he was on one of the expeditions. This word came to him as a kind of insight. In "Albatross Rock," White recounts a letter from an Italian pianist from the United States, where he was touring: “The other day I was talking to an Indian woman... She told me that her tribe would need a similar tool: first they would have to dig a hole in the ground, then string ropes over it. In the spirit of the Redskins, I answered that such an instrument should be called “Voice of the Earth”... I must note: I liked it too, because I also happened to imagine something similar.”, White adds.

And 15 years later in Ukraine, regardless of White, geopoetics was invented for his crazy projects by Igor Sid. Since 1993, he has been organizing festivals aimed at creating new territorial myths, and publishing articles and essays about it. Sid is, relatively speaking, the reincarnation of Voloshin: he constantly strives to turn some deserted place into a cultural one.

Before Voloshin, no one was interested in Koktebel - it was just a steppe where the Tatars lived, and the writers there looked very strange. And now it’s impossible to imagine Koktebel without writers. Voloshin made a resort out of the desert: one person managed to turn a completely abandoned place into a meaningful, even cultic one in its own way. Sid is now doing something similar, including in Kerch, the least known part of Crimea, holding the Bosporan Forum of Contemporary Culture festival for the fourth time; he secretly hopes to change something in this deserted place from a tourist point of view.

), who writes on these topics - and writes clearly, for which special thanks.
The first reason is more interesting. A year ago, I read the upcoming “Mary Poppins” to my daughter for bedtime - I remembered the impression this fairy tale made on me as a child, it was something completely other, special; Now, almost forty years later, I re-read it - this time the complete edition. And now I looked at the fairy tale with new eyes. I discovered a lot of interesting things.

Firstly, in Mary Poppins, in ordinary human society there is a network of “initiates”, those who possess a variety of magic - usually these are Mary Poppins’ uncles, to whom she takes the children to visit. As a rule, these people occupy marginal positions in society - a street artist, all sorts of eccentrics, a careless worker, a beggar woman, a balloon saleswoman. Those whom decent people practically do not notice. And in fact the supreme initiate in this society is the governess Mary Poppins. By the way, if you look closely at her behavior, she diligently protects her “subordinate” position in ordinary society, this is such a choice. So to summarize: the fairy tale tells about a secret network organization within human society, whose members have magical skills. At the same time, we note that this secret organization includes not only people, but also animals and spirits.

Secondly, in the fairy tale there are several holidays that have the features of mysteries (especially a holiday in the zoo) - a secret society plus mysteries equals Freemasons. Wiki helpfully suggests that the author - Pamella Travers - was a student of Gurdjiv. The hypothesis about the Masonic esotericism of the tale is confirmed.

And thirdly, what is the main idea this book is trying to convey? Is he trying so persistently that the thought seems to be hiding behind this obsession? To do this, let's look at the structure of each (every!) chapter of the book. The chapter begins with the children - Jane and Michael - going somewhere with their governess Mary Poppins; Usually they meet one of Mary Poppins' friends or relatives and all sorts of miracles happen. At the end of the chapter, they all return home and when one of the children (usually Michael) tries to ask Mary something, she always interrupts him indignantly: “Me? Flew in on a kite?! What are you allowing yourself to do, young man! One more word and you will be left without sweets!"
Did you notice? She never directly denies - in fact, she forbids talk about what you saw. Maybe the children dreamed of these miracles? No - the corner of a kite is peeking out of Mary Poppins' coat pocket. Everything was true, and this only emphasizes the main idea: IF YOU KNOW A SECRET KNOWLEDGE, KEEP UP ABOUT IT! This idea is strongly emphasized in every chapter of every Mary Poppins book.

So I read this fairy tale and it interested me - how can “secret knowledge”, alchemy and all sorts of esotericism exist in our time in the consciousness of a modern person? What role can they play? And that’s when I came across articles by Ekaterina Dice, a dozen and a half of which I printed out and read.

What is good about her articles is their clarity and intelligibility. As a rule, the main thesis is stated in the first or second paragraph, and then consistently justified.

For two millennia, Euro-Atlantic civilization was dominated by the Christian paradigm. This meant that a certain type of person - rational, not prone to mysticism, entrusting the possibility of ecstatic experience to specially trained people (priests), balanced, heterosexual, defending the priority of men in all prestigious areas, intolerant of any type of foreigners, etc. - was encouraged, cherished and established in culture in every possible way.
But when, it would seem, mechanism and orderliness reached their limit, the First and then the Second World Wars opened up an abyss of chaos that had long been hidden inside culture. And it turned out that many problems of modern civilization can be successfully solved by people of a different type - esotericists, crazy people (remember the great physicist Tesla, who claimed that formulas were dictated to him by aliens, but who worked productively at the General Electrics plant), queers and freaks, foreigners and women.

This is the beginning of the programmatic article "The Alchemy of Apuleius". There the Golden Ass is analyzed and it is proved that Apuleius was an alchemist - this is not important to me; More interesting are the discussions along the way about the mystery tradition and the methods and purposes of its existence:

The appeal to the image of the Minotaur is not accidental. Immersion in Antiquity, if we perceive culture organically, in our opinion, symbolizes a return to the perinatal state. But why is childhood trauma treated by Antiquity? Probably because it removes the medieval repression of the body and resolves many issues of the body.

Beatrice can be understood not only as the lost primary object of love, combined with the image of the mother, but also more broadly - as Persephone, in whose honor the Eleusinian Mysteries were held. Kidnapped from the real Dante, Beatrice becomes aware of the ancient secrets of katabasis and anabasis, like the one who watches the poet from the afterlife and tries to influence him through dreams.
Love thereby becomes a verification of the existence of another world, where corporeality is denied.

I’ll tell you straight, this is the kind of psychology I prefer not to read - it’s better to just read myths, they’re more honest.
It is interesting that in the article “The Alchemy of Apuleius” (this is really a programmatic article) the goal-setting of the mystery tradition is also mentioned:

Anyone born in the USSR or in the post-Soviet space can easily answer two questions - who is old man Hottabych, and how old was his friend the boy Volka. Hottabych is a kind genie; the boy who rescued him from the jug is a junior high school student, just as illustrators draw him on the covers... Nothing like that! Hottabych is not a good spirit, but an evil one, at least rebellious, while Volka is in his fourteenth year. And this story is not about sudden luck, but about the initiation that the chosen one goes through, about the temptations that he avoids, and about the fact that the Teacher and the Student are connected by an invisible thread and will still find each other, no matter how unimaginable the distances and time intervals between them didn't share. This book is about how the mystery tradition is never interrupted, and even in the very abyss of communist hell, a neophyte will find someone who will make an initiate out of him.

So, before us is clear evidence of an elegant intellectual game that took place on the verge of mortal risk. A book containing esoteric knowledge, which turned out to be popular in the country of victorious materialism. If it had been read adequately during the writer’s lifetime, he would have been in trouble. But maybe he was counting on the fact that no one would be able to read this book adequately? Or did he hope that, under the guise of a children's fairy tale, this story of initiation would survive both the Soviet Union and its atheistic warriors?

The Soviet state, whose symbol - the five-pointed star - was not only depicted on the seal of Solomon, but was also a symbol of initiation into the Order of the Assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain, inevitably faced such ridicule and “figs in the pocket.” They reach us as parts of the mosaic from which the culture was formed - half forgotten, half destroyed, but full of secret meanings. And we must cherish this wealth, which has passed through years of trials and has retained all the charm of fiction and all the depth of mystical revelations, which have not yet been fully revealed, but are no less attractive for this reason.

The article is good simply as an example of research that reveals hidden references to the mystery tradition. Some of them may well turn out to be a coincidence - but some are also most likely not noticed. You can simply consider this an intellectual game - “find the Mason in the fairy tale.” Quite exciting.

But seriously, what mystery tradition are we talking about? References to what exactly? This issue is discussed casually in the article “Masonic myth in the novel by the Strugatsky brothers “The Doomed City””:

By Masonic myth we understand that system of basic ideas, concepts, representations, allusions and references, which goes back to established ideas about the order, sometimes even if inconsistent with reality, but constituting the image of brotherhood that functions in culture. And it turns out that this image fits completely organically into Soviet science fiction, and millions of readers do not notice it.

Briefly, this myth can be represented this way: human nature is a rough stone that needs to be cut with the help of tools. From smooth stone, Masonic masons build a metaphorical Temple of the Spirit, as beautiful as the Temple of King Solomon. Perhaps it is this Temple that makes Masons related to other knights - the Templars or Templars, but this question remains not fully studied. However, in the collective myth, Freemasons are followers of the Templars, as well as Egyptian priests and medieval alchemists.

ivanov_petrov I recently wrote that the heyday of alchemy was not in the Middle Ages, but somewhere in the 17th-18th century, i.e. as a reaction to the ideas of the Enlightenment. Catherine Dice is looking for references to the Masonic myth, which, like any myth, is not very consistent with history. Maybe this myth is perceived as a game? No, quite seriously:

In fact, this novel by the Strugatsky brothers, filled with Masonic symbols and direct references to the ideology of free masons, can be called an initiation novel, a novel specially written as a dedicatory text. For many years since the completion of this work, it was not known to readers. Our hypothesis is that the authors did not publish it earlier not because of “anti-Sovietism” (if they wanted, experienced writers could bypass censorship), but because the text was originally conceived as a novel for mystics, a text for their own, a secret legends for the initiated. Perhaps this is precisely why the authors do not hide the ideology of building the Temple, the various symbols and signs of one of the powerful spiritual orders of Europe, that its first readers were underground Soviet Freemasons, who found solace and support in this text.

In the article “Clay Machine Guns and Inner Mongolia,” the author introduces the concept of “gnostic romance,” i.e. turns to the tradition that competed with Christianity - Gnosticism:

The situation is much more complicated with adherents of Gnosticism, which is often not institutionalized. However, there is a hypothesis that Russia is a Gnostic country in spirit. According to E. Conza, “Gnosticism is one of the main types of human religiosity and therefore should probably be reproduced in any period of time” by those people who simultaneously feel their total alienation from the world and are in contact with a living spiritual tradition. That is, we are talking about what the poet Igor Sid calls “gnostic anthropology” - a person’s socio-biological predisposition to become a gnostic.

But here the question arises: which works of fiction should be considered Gnostic? As a rule, these are texts imbued with a depressive worldview stemming from the idea of ​​an evil and unreasonable Demiurge. In Gnostic novels, the same plots are often found, where the characters reproduce the behavioral features of the heroes of the Gnostic myth. One of the clear references to the Gnostic cosmos is the experience of the world and the human body as a prison in which the divine spark is hidden.

Well, Pelevin was destined to be a Gnostic - this has a lot to do with postmodernism. In other articles, the author tries to substantiate the Gnosticism of Tsvetaeva and Chekhov - let’s leave this on her conscience, she is reluctant to understand.

Some aspects of Dogon mythology and the way it is represented remind us of the European secret or mystery tradition, which embraces the whole variety of ecstatic spiritual practices associated with direct magical experience, and a parallel official tradition. This includes various spiritual orders and esoteric practices such as alchemy or Kabbalah, and rudiments of paganism. The main thing in the mystery tradition is the Gnostic worldview and syncretism - an orientation towards the fusion of heterogeneous objects. Within this tradition, the Holy Grail, the Philosopher's Stone and the Golden Fleece are one and the same. The mystery tradition is characterized by magical thinking, a love of astrology and Tarot cards. Representatives of this tradition feel their kinship and unity through subtle signs and “symbols of faith.” While studying the mystery tradition, we paid attention to what Griaule, in his words, saw among the Dogons. And we were struck by the fact that in his presentation it was more like the secret knowledge of the European mystery tradition than the ideas characteristic of Africans.

In our opinion, the main question was that Marcel Griol was one of the Freemasons who deliberately brought his ideas to the Dogon, which then became shocking, since no one can explain where the Dogon got them from.

I admit, this fact makes me happy. It’s not that the researcher introduced the African people to Freemasonry - no, I am pleased that the generally primitive people did not have incredible cosmological knowledge, there was nowhere for it to come from - that is, this indirectly confirms that reliable knowledge about cosmology still gives us rational European science (I mean completely verifiable astronomical facts such as the satellites of Sirius and other astronomy).

And finally, a couple of quotes related to the theme of flight:

Since ancient times, humanity has been concerned about the possibility of individual flights. Within the framework of a rational civilization, it was solved with the help of various devices: airplanes, helicopters, hang gliders, balloons and airships. In the magical consciousness, flight is an important part of the mystical experience, which one must try to accomplish on one’s own. Flight for a magician is as part of the well-known maxim “give birth to a son, build a house, plant a tree.” This is a quest - that is, both the path and the goal.

The repeated flights of the lyrical hero of the Comedy, accompanied by Virgil and Beatrice, also refer us to the mystery tradition, for which flight is one of the forms of protest against the Christian cosmos. Let us remember the story of Simon Magus and the apostles Peter and Paul, who prayed for his fall. Flight is, on the one hand, a sign of magical qualification that likens mortals to angels, on the other hand, it is a physiologically accurate metaphor for the feeling of heavenly soaring that lovers experience.

Well, let's finish here. Have I received an answer as to how and why the alchemical/Masonic/mysterial/gnostic/esoteric tradition exists? Considering that in this note I did not consider the Christian prayer experience, then the answer, even if it was given, would not be complete. As a literary game, this tradition is quite alive - another thing is that it has largely degenerated into what is shown in Polanski’s film “The Ninth Gate” - it too easily degenerates into sexual orgies for those “hungry for mysticism”. Playing with this plot - it turned out to be a good film; only his ending is empty: Corso (Johnny Depp's hero) unravels the secrets of the devil's book and the gates open for him - and at that moment the final credits roll. There is nothing to say that he opened it. I believe that the most important and fundamental component of modern esoteric myth is that it's lost.

Mythology in modern Russian poetry:
Andrey Polyakov and Elena Schwartz

Ekaterina Dice

This report will focus on the two poles of modern Russian poetry - the poetess from St. Petersburg Elena Schwartz and the Crimean poet Andrei Polyakov. It makes sense to compare their work because they represent the widest range of poetic essences: north and south, male and female, conscious and spontaneous mystical principles. These are two authors who have long been firmly recognized by the poetic community and have internal authority, whose metaphysical searches deserve serious attention.

Mythology is associated with the archaic, with an appeal to the ancient way of thinking and action. Mythology has its own time - cyclical, and its own space - not yet fully studied, not fully known. Mythological thinking differs in key ways from modern thinking, and its main difference is in the natural acceptance of miracles, magic, mysticism, trust in natural forces and the triumph of emotions over reason. The cosmos of myth is syncretic, here everything is fused with everything, no one is surprised by constant transformations and metamorphoses, here a girl can become a tree, and a bull can turn out to be a god.

1
Nigredo Schwartz

Elena Schwartz admitted in an interview that “a poet is, involuntarily, some kind of priest” and called reading poetry a sacred sacrifice. In her understanding of the essence of the poet, the idea of ​​K.-G. Jung about the plurality of personality, about what Jung called the archetype of persona or mask - the social role that a person plays for the needs of society. In Schwartz’s view, the poet became something like an ancient actor-shaman, trying on the roles of creatures from different worlds: “...I had several masks, in verse: “Kinthia”, “Lavinia”. None of them grew in... They all somehow came off. Sometimes a mask is necessary to find out what you yourself are - several people live in each person, and it takes time to find and understand the true face. And this requires that you first have some kind of mask. And that universal, collective life, when the concept of the “circle” was important, - it in itself contributed to the mask character.”

Elena Schwartz herself defines her poetic direction as metamorphism, or in a sense, alchemy, the constant transmutation of everything and everyone, the unity of the world through this process. That is, in our opinion, she inherits the traditions of Apuleius - that secret alchemist of Hellenism, who encrypted the four stages of the alchemical Great Work in the history of the four trials of Psyche. As Elena Schwartz herself admitted: “As for alchemy, I personally explain it in the Jungian sense - something comes to us from the collective unconscious.” The point was that at the beginning of her creative career, the poet wrote texts imbued with alchemical symbolism, and only much later read alchemical treatises and books about the Great Craft - those that she was able to get in the early 1990s. But it was poetry that Schwartz considered alchemy, the art of transforming oneself into the Philosopher’s Stone. “I can still roughly be defined as a Christian Gnostic” - this is how Elena Schwartz defined her religious affiliation, emphasizing that her life’s duty was to bring into the world at least some small fraction, at least a spark of knowledge, or gnosis. And she wrote in her poems about a surgeon who considered himself a demiurge, about a madman who twirls a stone ball “like our demiurge on the earth,” and simply about the sick Demiurge.

Mental illness as a metaphor for an altered state of consciousness, in which access to other worlds is possible, is characteristic of Schwartz, whose “Works and Days of Lavinia, Nun of the Order of the Circumcision of the Heart,” is preceded by the so-called preface of the publisher, saying that the texts of the nun Lavinia are “...an example of a spontaneous explosion of the unconscious, which modern consciousness cannot cope with. Sister Lavinia boldly, I would even say, boldly went towards this explosion and paid, as we know, for it with her sanity... We hope that this bizarre mixture of visions, phantoms, meditations, simple confessions and unpretentious observations will provide food not only for psychoanalysts, but and will serve to better self-knowledge of modern man.” It is interesting that one of Schwartz’s self-definitions sounded like this: “a person of medieval consciousness,” which can be understood precisely as a mythologically oriented consciousness, full of alchemical and gnostic meanings.

One of the most important refrain symbols in Schwartz’s poetry is the green wolf-angel, tearing out the heart of the heroine, who becomes the sun, a ball of fire. For example:

Slowly he got closer to me -
The green wolf ate the heart.

Come, my Wolf Angel.
Fly, oh my gray one, come,
Oh, have pity, have mercy,
Such pain in my chest...

I thought that an angel would grab me
In the last moment the blade
But you want the sacrifice -
Hearts scarlet grain.

The wolf himself, called the angel, simultaneously undergoes a transformation into a lion, but is still recognizable under this new guise. This theme can be seen in several poems and, naturally, reminds us of Pushkin’s “Prophet”, inspired, in turn, by the vision of the prophet Isaiah.

“And he cut my chest with a sword,
And he took out my trembling heart,
And coal blazing with fire,
I pushed the hole into the chest...”

On the other hand, the wolf, the lion, and the sun are traditional and fairly common alchemical symbols, so you can read Schwartz’s poems in this vein. Thus, the green wolf is found in the book of the alchemist Fulcanelli “Philosophical Abodes”, where we talk about the holiday of the Green Wolf, celebrated in honor of Saint Osterberta, whose donkey was eaten by a wolf. The saint, who washed linen for the monastery and carried it on a donkey, forced the wolf to do the work of her victim. However, the legend does not explain why the wolf was green, but this is an important color for alchemy, associated with Hermes Trismegistus. Fulcanelli emphasizes that “the wolf turned green when he picked up and devoured the donkey. The "hungry and predatory wolf" is the reagent that Basil Valentine speaks of in the first of his Twelve Keys. This wolf is gray at first and does not in any way show that burning fire, the living light that lurks in his rough body. Light manifests itself, the wolf meets the donkey... The gray wolf becomes green and turns out to be our secret fire, born Apollo, the father of light."

Note that the heroine Schwartz is precisely a nun living in an unusual monastery:

Where is this monastery - it’s time to say:
Where the Permian forests intertwine with the Thuringian forest,
Where they pray to Francis, Seraphim,
Where lamas, buddhas, demons serve together,

Where the angel and the bear don't pass by,
Where in O the rons and the bees feed everyone, -
It was there today, it will be there yesterday.
I’ll also tell you what he looks like.

Circle of fire, snake ring,
Basement, attic, rocky mountain,
Khlystovsky ship, Bozhi Island -
It was there today, it will be there yesterday.

The fact that this monastery is alchemical is evident from the line “Circle of fire, serpentine ring,” which refers the reader to the famous alchemical symbol - Ouroboros, depicted as a snake biting its own tail. Crows are the birds of the first stage of the alchemical Great Work, Nigredo, and bees refer to the hive, which symbolizes primordial matter in alchemy. “...The masters of our art claim that the Work is hard Herculean labor, when you first need to strike a stone, a rock or a beehive (that is, our first matter) with a magic sword of secret fire, so that precious water flows from its depths.” , writes Fulcanelli. That is, in fact, Schwartz was talking about the Nigredo monastery (hence the demons, because this is the stage of the fall into the abyss, horror, death and decay), about the monastery turning into an alchemical furnace - Athanor. To confirm our observation, let us turn to poem 43 from “The Works and Days of Lavinia...”, which bears the subtitle “The Fiery Lesson.” It is about the fact that “The boys in the backyard lit / A living fire from boxes and rags, / And it hummed like a heart and shone...” Suddenly the Abbess throws Lavinia, complaining about her life, into this fire and calls on her to be patient , saying “Burn, child, burn, old lady...” When the Abbess takes Lavinia out of the fire, she utters completely alchemical words:

“Child, doesn’t it hurt? Salamander
You were in the past. Present
I changed your blood
Light and simmering on the flame."

We are talking here about death and rebirth in a new quality, about transformation, and not about actual destruction. “...Freed from the burden of the body, the soul experiences an uplift and enjoys unheard-of freedom, bathing in an indescribable light that is available only to pure spirits. The soul leaves its earthly body only to breathe life into a new body. Yesterday's old man is tomorrow's child." These words of Fulcanelli help explain the Abbess's whispering "burn child, burn old woman...", as well as further events associated with alchemical transmutation:

"I have become new, golden,
Ringing, strangely welcoming.
The fire was crackling and we went
To the monastery, singing peacefully.
I became strong, golden..."

It is worth emphasizing a key thing for understanding alchemy. The fact is that the common idea of ​​it as a predecessor of chemistry is a misconception. In fact, alchemy was the predecessor of psychology (it is not for nothing that C. G. Jung paid so much attention to its study). Just as in general, various fortune-telling, especially with Tarot cards, in ancient times replaced people with the craft of psychoanalysts. Note that the number of chapters in Schwartz’s poem “The Works and Days of Lavinia...” - 78 - coincides with the number of Tarot cards, and some symbols seem to be taken from this magic deck. So Schwartz dedicates the 66th poem to the “Fool,” or madman, brought to the monastery. Meanwhile, the Fool is a key figure in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, the meaning of which is that the initiator becomes a magician. Tarot cards, as well as card fortune telling in general, are usually associated with gypsies. In this sense, Schwartz’s lines: “I was a pastor and a magician, / I wore the uniform of different armies, / A gypsy...” - take on a new meaning. And the Abbess becomes the Pope or High Priestess, the holy hermit, the demon Theophilus, the tower, the Star, the Moon and the Sun find their prototypes in the cards of the Major Arcana. At first glance, the seemingly simple poetry of Elena Schwartz contains many esoteric meanings that have yet to be unraveled. And despite the fact that Schwartz has long become a cult figure of the St. Petersburg underground and a recognized poet, she is still largely misunderstood and unstudied.

2
Citrinitas Polyakova

Russian poet Andrei Polyakov, who lives in Simferopol, has long attracted the attention of various researchers with his constant references to ancient myths, which become the living fabric of his poetic speech. However, he builds his latest book on a slightly different foundation, on the foundation of mythology as alchemy.

Polyakov, who demonstratively exploits “classical” rhymes that were previously unusual for him: blood-love, things-ominous, sky-bread, rain-let’s wait, turns them into a semblance of the simplest elements, sulfur, salt and mercury, which lie at the basis of many mysterious transformations. The main core of the collection is internal alchemy, more precisely, Working in Yellow (Citrinitas) - the third of the four stages in the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, forgotten by European alchemists.

“On the dry road / the bush appeared in God,” writes Polyakov. Alchemy, both external, transforming base metals into noble ones, and internal, aimed at human self-improvement, recognizes two paths - dry and wet. This collision - the choice of road - is presented in the text by Valentin Andree “The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz...”, which can be read both as a novel and as a mystical treatise. Polyakov's poems are equally ambiguous - on the one hand, sophisticated poetry, on the other - evidence of self-initiation, an attempt to restore historically lost mysterious knowledge.

The three main stages of the alchemical process called the "Great Work" are Nigredo, Albedo, Rubedo. In the context of Jungian psychoanalysis, which brings the art of alchemy back into the research space, these three stages would correspond to depression, meditativeness and creativity. The first stage, Doing in Black, is considered the most studied; in particular, the books of philosophers and psychoanalysts Julia Kristeva “Black Sun” are dedicated to it. Depression and Melancholy" and Stanton Marlan's "Black Sun. Alchemy and the Art of Darkness." And in this sense, Elena Schwartz’s Nigredo is not only determined by the Kabbalistic play on words “Schwartz” and “Making in Black”, but also by simple statistics, because people who are in a state of Nigredo more often perceive this as their problem, more often turn to psychoanalysts for help or trying to transform Nigredo's destructive forces into something positive. I know one philosopher who, year after year, drives himself into depression, allowing him to read books and publish a monograph a year. He uses the destructiveness of chaos to isolate himself from the reality that interferes with creativity. Schwartz did the same, drawing inspiration from Nigredo, Andrei Polyakov prefers the transition from quiet meditation to creative activity - or Doing in Yellow.

European alchemy is believed to come from Ancient Egypt and is the art of turning lead into gold. But alchemy was also in China, the country of the yellow emperor - this is “Taoist alchemy”, aimed primarily at the inner world of a person, who in the spiritual sense was supposed to become “golden”. Polyakov’s world is at the junction of two traditions, Western and Eastern, just like the Crimean Peninsula, where the poet lives, at the junction of two cultures, two mentalities, on the border of West and East, in the space of the limitrophe.

The epigraph, according to the observation of Mikhail Eisenberg, goes back to the quote: “I thought and understood. We all know this / that the action has become sleepless China...” from Alexander Vvedensky, at one time a sinologist who used in his work, in the terminology of the “plane tree” theorist Leonid Lipavsky, “ hieroglyphs" - indirect speech of the spiritual principle penetrating through matter. The Gnostics would call this the voice of the Pleroma, and Carl Jung would call it the archetypes.

Polyakov’s main “hieroglyph” is gold, reflected in the yellow leaves of autumn, the skin of Chinese characters, the yellow-blue plumage of the tit, the Golden Horde, etc., and symbolizing the result of the creative process. The mystical beginning, the appeal to archetypes - on top of knowledge, outside of initiation - is an interesting phenomenon that is often encountered in the history of culture. When a living tradition dies (and practically no information about the essence of the Citrinitas process has reached our time), those who want to restore it arise, and in the absence of the opportunity to receive secret knowledge from initiates, they undergo self-initiation.

The origins of the interest in alchemy that has recently been present among many modern poets should be sought in the Silver Age, with its intense attention to the occult and mysticism. Thus, an openly Gnostic motto (the Gnostics considered the world and the body a prison for the spirit) can be heard in Polyakov’s lines: “I believe in God, / therefore / I consider time as a prison,” echoing Tsvetaeva’s “In the body as in a hold / in myself - as in prison/is alive, not dead/the demon is in me.”

Irina Anastasievich, a researcher of Vvedensky’s work, touching on the theme of birds in the poet’s work, writes: “Alchemists used traditional mythological images of birds as symbols to describe the alchemical transformation, since birds represent a transition from the physical (earth) to the metaphysical (sky)” and leads to as an example, including the following lines:

“But who are you, a swallow of heaven, are you an animal or are you a forest” and “we had to tear off the flying tit, deaf as a bed in the sky, like an eyelash”

And just as for Irina Anastasievich the world of Vvedensky is full of alchemical bird-symbols, we see this in the poems of Andrei Polyakov, who is trying to bring Taoist alchemy into the field of the Russian language and cross it with European alchemy.

First of all, the choice of time is autumn, which is comparable to the Eleusinian Mysteries, held every year in mid-September, the main character of which was Persephone: “I, invisibly swinging on the yellow and black waves of the other/ ether, will hold Persephone in my head... even if I am baptized but still often I want/in the fall to believe in some beautiful night goddesses.” Another poem probably refers to Demeter, another goddess of Eleusis, whose iconography included a sheaf of ears. According to myth, the goddess of fertility Demeter, as a sign of mourning for the passing of Hades Persephone, made the earth stop bringing gifts. In this sense, the title of the book can be rethought as “Chinese Hell”, from the first meaning of the English word “descent” - descent, fall. Here it is appropriate to recall the alliteration “Tatars-Tartar”, which is not pronounced by the author, but is easily readable.

Persephone's return to her mother is marked by the blossoming of life and is associated with spring; she spends only the winter months in the kingdom of Hades. And Polyakov, rethinking the myth, writes: “What if we fall asleep and fill the eyes/ with the seamy side of the swallows, lying gliding in a blackening dance…/ The goddess’s ear does not prick her cold chest…”.

And here are the incarnations of the goddess, corresponding to the three main stages of the Great Work:

“The goddess’s left hand is white, like clouds in May, and her right hand is the hand of hearts, and the third hand is invisible for now...”

Evgeny Torchinov, a famous researcher of Taoist alchemy, writes that “on the 15th day of the 8th month according to the lunar calendar, the traditional Chinese holiday “zhong qiu” - mid-autumn occurs.” This festival, which falls on the full moon, is associated with the moon, as stated in the verse of the Chinese alchemist: “On the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, the toad above shines. This is truly the time of flowering and fullness of the metal seed. When one line of yang arises, life will come again.” return." Then do not hesitate and do not delay: the time of fire has come." That is, Polyakov’s premonition of autumn is the time of the Chinese Full Moon holiday and at the same time the Eleusinian Mysteries.

In almost every poem in this collection, Polyakov mentions yellow or gold colors, connecting them with China. For example:
“But heavenly Moscow will return my words with Chinese gold to the smart swallows.”

Where there is no yellow and gold, and such verses are in the minority, there are either black, white, or red colors, and they are also mentioned in O ronas are birds associated with Nigredo, which was noted by Anastasievich in the case of Vvedensky. Autumn, with its dead yellow leaves becoming words, becomes no more and no less than an apology for the alchemical stage of Citrinitas, the transition from contemplation to versification:

“The yellowish pallor of the foliage will rustle like alphabet letters in the corners!”

By turning the annual cycle of seasons into an allegory of the alchemical process, the poet gives new meaning to Nigredo (spring), Rubedo (summer), Citrinitas (autumn) and Albedo (winter).

China here is related to the city of Kitezh, as well as to that golden city, which is located above a blue sky, as in the original text by Henri Volokhonsky “Paradise”, from which Boris Grebenshchikov made the song “Under the Blue Sky...” It is not without reason that in the epigraph to the collection the poet says: “... in the autumn leaves is Jerusalem!” Polyakov's book is permeated through and through with gold and azure - the colors of heavenly Jerusalem, the favorite color of Russian icons. And even small Chinese (or heavenly) apples play in the text with their second unnamed name.

“What language do I fall asleep in, I don’t see friends from the east... What do I need to say about golden ignorance? Better than autumn, distant China, Round apples, Love’s harvest.”

But not only connotations associated with Paradise, as far away as China, we see in this poem, but also a reference to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, to whom apples, swallows and linden trees were dedicated.

By the way, the connection between round apples and distant China has already been attempted in Russian in the latest album of the rock group “Nautilus Pompilius” “ AppleChina" Moreover, according to the musicians, it goes back to the tracing of the word “orange” from German, Apfelsine. The gold content of China reaches its apogee in Polyakov’s words “Gold China,” which openly refers to “Yablokitai.”

Thus, Polyakov’s blue and tit are connected with China through an unpronounceable consonance. Moreover, China appears as an analogue of Paradise, where instead of Eve (from Hebrew “life”) Zoya (“life” in ancient Greek) reigns. “Zoya came and lived” - an allusion to Vvedensky’s text:

“Zoya enters. She undresses, which means she wants to wash. Two merchants swim and wander around the pool. ZOYA. Merchants, are you men? TWO MERCHANTS. We are men. We are swimming. ZOYA. Merchants, where we are. What are we playing? TWO MERCHANTS. We are in the bathhouse. We wash ourselves. ZOYA. Merchants, I will swim and wash. I will play the flute. TWO MERCHANTS. Swim. Wash yourself. Play. ZOYA. Maybe this is hell" 22.

The topographical ambivalence of this bathhouse, where Eva-Life-Zoe enters, does not allow us to say with certainty whether this is hell or heaven. Although the ending of the penultimate line (“play”) indicates the latter. But let's pay attention to what Zoya is doing - swimming and playing. Just like Polyakov’s (“float in the leaves, /flying bird”) and the repeated rhyme “fly - China,” where the imperative of the verb “fly” turns into the dead flow of the Lethe River. Moreover, the time of year chosen for the book is golden autumn, the time of leaf fall, which comes after summer. The poet rhymes the reading with China, creating two characters: stupid girl And boy reading.

But let's return to Zoya. From a mythological point of view, this name is associated with the planet Venus, named after the Roman goddess of love, corresponding to the Greek Aphrodite. In this light, Polyakov’s lines are read in a very special way, in which the entry of tanks, prompted by the belligerence of Mars, is coupled with the raising of Zoya’s eyebrow, associated with Venus.

The extreme condensation of images is also visible in what is perhaps the best poem in the book. Let's quote it in full:

“Swallow, what is your fault?” “The only thing is that I lost my brother, I lost my ant brother!” The ant unravels the braids, and the soul: is not to blame for anything, forgetting its little brother, flying away into black words.

The soul in this case is Psyche from Apuleius’s “Metamorphoses...”, busy with a complex task. Trying to complete the difficult task of Venus - to sort a bunch of grain into varieties in one night (here, obviously, lie the origins of the fairy tale about Cinderella), Psyche calls on ants for help. Cinderella copes with the test with the help of other magical helpers - doves, symbolizing love and belonging, like swallows, to Venus. Cinderella-Zoe, putting butterflies on her temples, thereby shows her kinship with Psyche, the soul, the butterfly. Polyakov writes subtly and sparingly, at the subconscious level, just as Apuleius inserts a short story inside a novel, introducing what exactly the swallow Psyche lost: brother A

22) Vvedensky A. Potets // Vvedensky A. I. Everything. M.: OGI, 2010. pp. 235-236.