Algunas fuentes indecentes especulan con la intervención del gnostic voudoun priest, Michael Bertiaux, en el segundo tomo de Nosotros los brujos, que secretan de a poco los orfebres dérmicos del primer tomo. Su ópera magna, el Gnostic Voudoun Workbook, hoy cotizado en cientos de euros, hizo arder en llamas toda previsibilidad teosófico-esotérica en el mundo de las vías iniciáticas, disparando una obra de sutilísimos indiscernibles entre magia y arte, vudú haitiano y teurgia martinista (efecto del intercambio franco-haitiano amos-esclavos durante la colonia), brujería y gnosticismo, especulación psy-fi y pragmática ritual a prueba de timoratos.
Para no abundar en vaguedades sobre nuestro invitado futurible, dejamos a la vista una entrevista que le hiciera un nórdico en el 2003, donde se explaya sobre arte, ocultismo, vudú y ... ¡patafísica!, a todas luces su post-vanguardia predilecta. También descubriremos por qué Micahel Bertiaux es el cartonero que todo el extrarradio alógeno se merece.
An interview with Michael Bertiaux
by Bjarne Salling Pedersen
(fragmentos)
Author and occultist Michael P. Bertiaux (born 1935) is an influential character in the revival of western magical tradition that began in the late 1960ies. In this interview he discusses the connection between occultism and art, his views on several occult societies and the attraction of Voodoo in the western world.
Michael Bertiaux, a modern day explorer of the occult, was born in 1935. Raised in a Theosophical household he’s been influenced by the esoteric approach to religion since his youth. In 1963 Michael Bertiaux got acquainted with Voodoo Docteur Jean-Maine during a stay in Haiti that year. Returning to the USA his studies with Docteur Jean-Maine continued until 1975.
Michael Bertiaux has been connected with various occult and esoteric organizations during the last four decades. Some of the orders include Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua (O.T.O.A.) and Fraternitas Saturni, at one time associated with the occult currents of English magician and Golden Dawn member Aleister Crowley. Bertiaux is also assosiated with Monastery of the Seven Rays and La Couleuvre Noire (The Black Serpent), both orders associated with Voodoo technique. Drawing heavily on French sources, he’s also a Martinist and a leader of the Ecclesia Gnostica Spiritualis, a gnostic church of French spiritist origin.
The latter years Bertiaux has been relatively silent. He’s recently retired to focus on his writing.
- Well, I’m happy to be still on the planet, says Bertiaux. I think the important thing is that I am quite focused on my areas of interest, which I first outlined in my Monastery of the Seven Rays papers. I think I have always been indebted to the Haitian spiritist tradition. I have always been indebted to things that have come out of that tradition and I’ve always preferred to stay within those boundaries. But that would also include art because so many of the Haitian occultists were painters. Many Haitians, little known, express their ideas through art, simply because so many of the ideas couldn’t be expressed in words only. There was such a problem of what type of energy they were speaking of; how could it be communicated? Sometimes it could only be communicated with colors like abstract expressionism.
Why is Haitian art so powerful and why are artists so special?
- I think it is a high form of expressionism. I think they portray energies in a way that the abstract expressionists (1940ies – 1960ies) in America and Europe haven’t succeeded in objectifying. I think what’s so important in Haitian esotericism is that everything can be represented in some kind of art. If it can’t, I really believe it is only a matter of concept. A lot of Haitian art comes out of the Voodoo religion, but if you look closely you’ll find that it goes beyond the religious perspective. They’re going into the occult science behind the Voodoo. They are taking a voyage into the spirit-painting.
What do you mean?
- They’re not only artists. They are meta-physicists. I think that what they wanted to do was to talk about how spirits work. In Voodoo there is so much passive petitioning of the gods. It’s a very pious religion. In fact, it is in many ways a religion of fear of the spirits, but once you admit the factor of possession, says Bertiaux, you actually have the individual being possessed by a god, which is an infinite personal experience - of cosmic cause - for they’re sharing the same consciousness. Then you overcome this feeling of petitioning and move towards a kind of pure identity where you understand the mind of the god, as if you were the god, or possessing the mind of the god for a moment. I think much of esoteric Voodoo has to do with understanding the mind of the gods, from within. I concur that possessions are facts and an accomplishment. I think that in terms of their mystical way of living – they see Voodoo not as much as a religion, but rather as an environment; a psychic occult environment in which they live. Everything about it is sanctioned by gods. It is a religious universe of mysteries possessing humans or initiates.
- I think art is one way in which magical symbols and images can be presented to the public in a way that will not appear threatening. We know from the history of art in the past 100 years, that many genuine schools of occultism came forth to present themselves as what I am going to call mystical schools of painting, of sculpture and so forth.
- I am particularly concerned about one French school, says Bertiaux. It is the pataphysical school. It was allied to Dada, surrealism, spiritualism and trance mediumship. The pataphysicians are my favorites, because what they sought to do was to create a kind of alternative science. I remember a pataphysician telling me, that as metaphysics is to physics, so pataphysics is to metaphysics, which meant an intuitive extension into the abstract or the transcendental or the less known aspects of experience.
What were the characteristics of this school, I asked?
- One of the characteristics would be their drawing of inspiration from dream states and a kind of somnambulistic meditation, says Bertiaux. Another would be the idea that everything has a psychic history. This is related to “the cult of the found object” in modern art, the discovery of “the given.”
-The famous American sculptress Louise Nevelson - who worked with large assemblages and collages made from wood and wooden pieces - she had what I call her esoteric school, Bertiaux explains. These helpers of Louise Nevelson would get up very early in the morning. She lived in a town house in Manhattan, I believe; and they would go up and down the alleys, looking for discards. They were all kinds of individuals who were perhaps misfits in the outer world, but she believed them to be tremendously psychic. They all worked for her as her technicians, her helpers, in finding objects and wrapping them up in newspapers and paper bags, bringing them home; and then when they had all these treasures before them, they would let the objects tell them where to use them. And this came from a kind of psychic dialogue with the found object – which, I might add, was very similar to what Carl Jung taught many of his patients, to engage in with many natural things in their own experience.
- I myself, have developed a kind of found object-obsession with cardboard, as you can see. I don’t like to throw out pieces of cardboard that can be used as works of art!
Michael Bertiaux 2003 flanked by a Golem figure
and the front cover design to a forthcoming book.
Several of Michael Bertiaux’s works are shaped out of cardboard and painted. He’s working on a series of what he calls Golem figures intended as guardians of the magical circle, of the esoteric space of exploration.
- I will only throw out a piece of cardboard if it tells me to, laughs Michael Bertiaux.
- I think one of the important things about found objects and the occult is that the found object was a way of making magical art more and more dynamic, by infusing more and more mental and psychic concentration - and force the creativity of the artist – into the very fabric of the subject matter.
- And it’s had a tremendous focus in a variety of spin-off types of art where found objects are now sometimes arranged in magical spaces which are defined by old wooden boxes which people find, and they create a magical universe in which the found objects or the objects from the individuals past that are re-found after many years of being lost, are placed “to live”. They’re refound and placed into the space to convey a kind of psychic memory; but to also take on a new life and growth.
-Now, there’s some questions as to whether or not the elementals in the works of art, are natural or simply they are re-arrangements of the energy. I think they are both. I think they are created elementals. I have always believed that magic, rather than being a level of interpretation, and a kind of conceptualization of the subject matter, is that which gives it another direction and I will say therefore that it makes it become a new type of being also.
-I would say that the artistic rays of the pataphysical philosophy have permeated many avenues of modern creativity. Many writers who have abandoned traditional methods are using pataphysical inspiration for how they express their creative matter; and many modern musical compositions we know are inspired by pataphysical and radical innovation and a departure from a conventional straightjacketing of their creative energies.
-I don’t think that rebellion is necessarily harmful to all individuals. I think what they do, is that they challenge ideas and open doorways faster. I think that for example the school of Felicien Rops is more creative than the Russian Orthodox Church, but the Russian Orthodox Church is more beautiful and more powerful in the long run, he adds laughing. But I still think they can co-exist and each has their work to do, says Michael Bertiaux. They exist as the right wing and the left wing and balance each other.
- I personally think that modern esotericism has for the most part been a movement of liberation of individuals from, what I’ll call, repressive misconceptions of religion; and especially from protestant or evangelical fundamentalism. But one thing in esotericism that’s always been interesting is that there’s always been a link with art. I’ve always seen this as an excellent barometer.
-I think that when an individual is programmed too much by Puritanism it is very sad. I remember hearing a story when I was a child: There was this little boy in our community and he wanted to be an artist. His parents said no, we want you to only read the Bible and not to paint. Painting will get you too close to demons. Well, the kid was of course very frustrated. When he was old enough he ran away from home and lived in a kind of hippie-like commune in California and broke out of his puritan and fundamentalist evangelical conditioning. He ran off and lived on the coast in a cave and produced abstract paintings and sold them at a truck stop for his food; but he was happy about it. He said that he was happier than he’d ever been before.
- So what I try to do with my writing is to emphasis to the positive side of positive and negative. Of course I do not shy away from zombies and all the other hidden matters. I might add that the first book I wrote on zombies was a comparison of the zombies to the Golem, the Hebrew cabbalistic concept of the mannequin. I’ve always felt – I have always, always, always felt, that somehow Hebrew magic and Voodoo have many cognates, as many books have sought to show, e.g. Milo Rigaud, etc.; but found in the Gnostic Brotherhood of Alchemists in California.
- Voodoo is like closet Zionism. Almost, adds Bertiaux with his usual smile. It is the vision of the holy kingdom and the holy faith. I’m always amused by the way coincidences amplify life, says Michael Bertiaux.
-You should not pass judgment on things, adds he. What you’re doing is creating a mental block, and that’s going to block energy flow. I’m not saying that yo u should be like a rolling stone and go all over the place; but I think that what you should do is realize that everything speaks and grows and lives, and again we get back at what I said at the beginning. It is the found object that communicated with the artist, not the object being communicated by the artists mind. So it is with opportunities. They open doorways and energies come to us.
Notes
i Michael Bertiaux ”sees art as the most efficient way of expressing how occult energies are manifest. Art is really its own Gnosis, and the alliance between art and esotericism is more verifiable today, than a century ago” – Commentary on Interview, from Bertiaux to Pedersen, September 25th, 2003.
ii “For pataphysics, if all objects that are found are psychic or ”alive” – then all elementals and parts of nature and ”artificial elementals”, are really natural or parts of ”the continuum of nature and inquiry” which must include all aspects of art within its evolution.” – Commentary on Interview, from Bertiaux to Pedersen, September 25th, 2003.
iii ”In this sense pataphysics is the true child of H. P. Blavatsky’s esoteric system, because she taught the “ways of world building” long before anyone in the west in her “transactions” of the Blavatsky lodge of the T.S.” – Commentary on Interview, from Bertiaux to Pedersen, September 25th, 2003.
Para no abundar en vaguedades sobre nuestro invitado futurible, dejamos a la vista una entrevista que le hiciera un nórdico en el 2003, donde se explaya sobre arte, ocultismo, vudú y ... ¡patafísica!, a todas luces su post-vanguardia predilecta. También descubriremos por qué Micahel Bertiaux es el cartonero que todo el extrarradio alógeno se merece.
An interview with Michael Bertiaux
by Bjarne Salling Pedersen
(fragmentos)
Author and occultist Michael P. Bertiaux (born 1935) is an influential character in the revival of western magical tradition that began in the late 1960ies. In this interview he discusses the connection between occultism and art, his views on several occult societies and the attraction of Voodoo in the western world.
Michael Bertiaux, a modern day explorer of the occult, was born in 1935. Raised in a Theosophical household he’s been influenced by the esoteric approach to religion since his youth. In 1963 Michael Bertiaux got acquainted with Voodoo Docteur Jean-Maine during a stay in Haiti that year. Returning to the USA his studies with Docteur Jean-Maine continued until 1975.
Michael Bertiaux has been connected with various occult and esoteric organizations during the last four decades. Some of the orders include Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua (O.T.O.A.) and Fraternitas Saturni, at one time associated with the occult currents of English magician and Golden Dawn member Aleister Crowley. Bertiaux is also assosiated with Monastery of the Seven Rays and La Couleuvre Noire (The Black Serpent), both orders associated with Voodoo technique. Drawing heavily on French sources, he’s also a Martinist and a leader of the Ecclesia Gnostica Spiritualis, a gnostic church of French spiritist origin.
The latter years Bertiaux has been relatively silent. He’s recently retired to focus on his writing.
- Well, I’m happy to be still on the planet, says Bertiaux. I think the important thing is that I am quite focused on my areas of interest, which I first outlined in my Monastery of the Seven Rays papers. I think I have always been indebted to the Haitian spiritist tradition. I have always been indebted to things that have come out of that tradition and I’ve always preferred to stay within those boundaries. But that would also include art because so many of the Haitian occultists were painters. Many Haitians, little known, express their ideas through art, simply because so many of the ideas couldn’t be expressed in words only. There was such a problem of what type of energy they were speaking of; how could it be communicated? Sometimes it could only be communicated with colors like abstract expressionism.
Why is Haitian art so powerful and why are artists so special?
- I think it is a high form of expressionism. I think they portray energies in a way that the abstract expressionists (1940ies – 1960ies) in America and Europe haven’t succeeded in objectifying. I think what’s so important in Haitian esotericism is that everything can be represented in some kind of art. If it can’t, I really believe it is only a matter of concept. A lot of Haitian art comes out of the Voodoo religion, but if you look closely you’ll find that it goes beyond the religious perspective. They’re going into the occult science behind the Voodoo. They are taking a voyage into the spirit-painting.
What do you mean?
- They’re not only artists. They are meta-physicists. I think that what they wanted to do was to talk about how spirits work. In Voodoo there is so much passive petitioning of the gods. It’s a very pious religion. In fact, it is in many ways a religion of fear of the spirits, but once you admit the factor of possession, says Bertiaux, you actually have the individual being possessed by a god, which is an infinite personal experience - of cosmic cause - for they’re sharing the same consciousness. Then you overcome this feeling of petitioning and move towards a kind of pure identity where you understand the mind of the god, as if you were the god, or possessing the mind of the god for a moment. I think much of esoteric Voodoo has to do with understanding the mind of the gods, from within. I concur that possessions are facts and an accomplishment. I think that in terms of their mystical way of living – they see Voodoo not as much as a religion, but rather as an environment; a psychic occult environment in which they live. Everything about it is sanctioned by gods. It is a religious universe of mysteries possessing humans or initiates.
- I think art is one way in which magical symbols and images can be presented to the public in a way that will not appear threatening. We know from the history of art in the past 100 years, that many genuine schools of occultism came forth to present themselves as what I am going to call mystical schools of painting, of sculpture and so forth.
- I am particularly concerned about one French school, says Bertiaux. It is the pataphysical school. It was allied to Dada, surrealism, spiritualism and trance mediumship. The pataphysicians are my favorites, because what they sought to do was to create a kind of alternative science. I remember a pataphysician telling me, that as metaphysics is to physics, so pataphysics is to metaphysics, which meant an intuitive extension into the abstract or the transcendental or the less known aspects of experience.
What were the characteristics of this school, I asked?
- One of the characteristics would be their drawing of inspiration from dream states and a kind of somnambulistic meditation, says Bertiaux. Another would be the idea that everything has a psychic history. This is related to “the cult of the found object” in modern art, the discovery of “the given.”
-The famous American sculptress Louise Nevelson - who worked with large assemblages and collages made from wood and wooden pieces - she had what I call her esoteric school, Bertiaux explains. These helpers of Louise Nevelson would get up very early in the morning. She lived in a town house in Manhattan, I believe; and they would go up and down the alleys, looking for discards. They were all kinds of individuals who were perhaps misfits in the outer world, but she believed them to be tremendously psychic. They all worked for her as her technicians, her helpers, in finding objects and wrapping them up in newspapers and paper bags, bringing them home; and then when they had all these treasures before them, they would let the objects tell them where to use them. And this came from a kind of psychic dialogue with the found object – which, I might add, was very similar to what Carl Jung taught many of his patients, to engage in with many natural things in their own experience.
- I myself, have developed a kind of found object-obsession with cardboard, as you can see. I don’t like to throw out pieces of cardboard that can be used as works of art!
Michael Bertiaux 2003 flanked by a Golem figure
and the front cover design to a forthcoming book.
Several of Michael Bertiaux’s works are shaped out of cardboard and painted. He’s working on a series of what he calls Golem figures intended as guardians of the magical circle, of the esoteric space of exploration.
- I will only throw out a piece of cardboard if it tells me to, laughs Michael Bertiaux.
- I think one of the important things about found objects and the occult is that the found object was a way of making magical art more and more dynamic, by infusing more and more mental and psychic concentration - and force the creativity of the artist – into the very fabric of the subject matter.
- And it’s had a tremendous focus in a variety of spin-off types of art where found objects are now sometimes arranged in magical spaces which are defined by old wooden boxes which people find, and they create a magical universe in which the found objects or the objects from the individuals past that are re-found after many years of being lost, are placed “to live”. They’re refound and placed into the space to convey a kind of psychic memory; but to also take on a new life and growth.
-Now, there’s some questions as to whether or not the elementals in the works of art, are natural or simply they are re-arrangements of the energy. I think they are both. I think they are created elementals. I have always believed that magic, rather than being a level of interpretation, and a kind of conceptualization of the subject matter, is that which gives it another direction and I will say therefore that it makes it become a new type of being also.
-I would say that the artistic rays of the pataphysical philosophy have permeated many avenues of modern creativity. Many writers who have abandoned traditional methods are using pataphysical inspiration for how they express their creative matter; and many modern musical compositions we know are inspired by pataphysical and radical innovation and a departure from a conventional straightjacketing of their creative energies.
-I don’t think that rebellion is necessarily harmful to all individuals. I think what they do, is that they challenge ideas and open doorways faster. I think that for example the school of Felicien Rops is more creative than the Russian Orthodox Church, but the Russian Orthodox Church is more beautiful and more powerful in the long run, he adds laughing. But I still think they can co-exist and each has their work to do, says Michael Bertiaux. They exist as the right wing and the left wing and balance each other.
- I personally think that modern esotericism has for the most part been a movement of liberation of individuals from, what I’ll call, repressive misconceptions of religion; and especially from protestant or evangelical fundamentalism. But one thing in esotericism that’s always been interesting is that there’s always been a link with art. I’ve always seen this as an excellent barometer.
-I think that when an individual is programmed too much by Puritanism it is very sad. I remember hearing a story when I was a child: There was this little boy in our community and he wanted to be an artist. His parents said no, we want you to only read the Bible and not to paint. Painting will get you too close to demons. Well, the kid was of course very frustrated. When he was old enough he ran away from home and lived in a kind of hippie-like commune in California and broke out of his puritan and fundamentalist evangelical conditioning. He ran off and lived on the coast in a cave and produced abstract paintings and sold them at a truck stop for his food; but he was happy about it. He said that he was happier than he’d ever been before.
- So what I try to do with my writing is to emphasis to the positive side of positive and negative. Of course I do not shy away from zombies and all the other hidden matters. I might add that the first book I wrote on zombies was a comparison of the zombies to the Golem, the Hebrew cabbalistic concept of the mannequin. I’ve always felt – I have always, always, always felt, that somehow Hebrew magic and Voodoo have many cognates, as many books have sought to show, e.g. Milo Rigaud, etc.; but found in the Gnostic Brotherhood of Alchemists in California.
- Voodoo is like closet Zionism. Almost, adds Bertiaux with his usual smile. It is the vision of the holy kingdom and the holy faith. I’m always amused by the way coincidences amplify life, says Michael Bertiaux.
-You should not pass judgment on things, adds he. What you’re doing is creating a mental block, and that’s going to block energy flow. I’m not saying that yo u should be like a rolling stone and go all over the place; but I think that what you should do is realize that everything speaks and grows and lives, and again we get back at what I said at the beginning. It is the found object that communicated with the artist, not the object being communicated by the artists mind. So it is with opportunities. They open doorways and energies come to us.
Notes
i Michael Bertiaux ”sees art as the most efficient way of expressing how occult energies are manifest. Art is really its own Gnosis, and the alliance between art and esotericism is more verifiable today, than a century ago” – Commentary on Interview, from Bertiaux to Pedersen, September 25th, 2003.
ii “For pataphysics, if all objects that are found are psychic or ”alive” – then all elementals and parts of nature and ”artificial elementals”, are really natural or parts of ”the continuum of nature and inquiry” which must include all aspects of art within its evolution.” – Commentary on Interview, from Bertiaux to Pedersen, September 25th, 2003.
iii ”In this sense pataphysics is the true child of H. P. Blavatsky’s esoteric system, because she taught the “ways of world building” long before anyone in the west in her “transactions” of the Blavatsky lodge of the T.S.” – Commentary on Interview, from Bertiaux to Pedersen, September 25th, 2003.
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