Cosmic Fragments: De Chirico, Calligrammes and Particles of the Sky

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Cosmic Fragments: De Chirico, Calligrammes and Particles of the Sky

[This long quarrel] I judge: traditioninvention

OrderAdventure

You whose speech is made in the image of Gods speech

Speech equal to orders own self

Be easy on us when you are comparing

Us and those who were the perfection of order

Us looking all around for adventure

Us not your enemy

Who want to present you strange mighty lands

Where flowering mystery surrenders itself to the takers

Where new fires are and colors unseen

Phantasms by the thousands weightless

Which need to be given reality

And we want to explore bountys enormous land all stillness

Where time is to banish to call back

Pity us battling always at the limits

Of limitlessness and tomorrow

Pity our errors pity our sins.

--Guillaume Apollinaire

from La Jolie Rousse (Calligrammes)

It took almost a decade following the war and the death of Apollinaire for some artists to attempt a return to Paris. Still real the loss of idealism, the suspension of hope amid memories of annihilation. In 1928 the writer Massimo Bontempelli described these years as the fatigue of a great epoch, exhausted by age after nineteen centuries of the most complicated life. For many it was a period defined by historic fatalism, comprised of a lost, incredulous generation that according to Gertrude Stein had ironically survived itself and a world war. In this atmosphere of disintegration and negation a yearning for transcendence flickered among artists long associated with the agonism of the avant-garde. It was in this wider sea of longing that an affirmation of life, Adornos standard by which all thought is to be measured, struggled to revive.

Framed by two World Wars, and originating in events surrounding the Great War followed by the death of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1918, the sixty six lithographs produced by De Chirico for Apollinaires Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (originally published in 1918 by Gallimard with a frontispiece of Apollinaire by Picasso, but reissued in 1930 with the De Chirico lithographs) represent an homage to Apollinaire based in the conflicted consciousness of the avant-garde. (Figure 1) (Figure 2) It does so by engaging in a series of historical and mystical appositions that locate signs of temporal decrepitude, the failure of directional history beside Aristotelian visions of eternity. At the same time, unfolding quasi as a cinematic storyboard, Calligrammes extends the possibility of movement to a fixed historical order increasingly signaled by crepuscular demise.

This article proposes that De Chiricos lithographs for Calligrammes which have eluded scholarly analysis invoke cosmic and cyclical paradigms of spiritual renewal alongside denigrations of history; that such imagery derives in part from a variety of mystical and occult sources then current among the Parisian avant-garde; that these quotations took the form of a paradoxical apposition of destructive and regenerative forces based in a confrontation between European historicism and Oriental mysticism (a confrontation that links De Chirico with Dada, neo-Futurism and more recent neo-Dada iconoclasm and post-structuralism, as well as to the protean mystical aspirations of early modern abstraction); and finally that De Chiricos purpose in so doing was to apotheosize and to eulogize Apollinaire in illo tempore, so as to reenact a creative process of fading luminosity.

Cosmos and Chaos

Since remote antiquity, time has been mythologized in terms of a cosmos and chaos dichotomy in which a primeval abyss (or darkness) existed before (and in some cosmogonies co-existed beside) creation, with history and human realization occurring along evolutionary lines. Such a conception of deep time embodies polarities of thought surrounding the subject of time, described by geologist Stephen Gould as times arrow and times cycle, linear arrows of history and circular cycles of immanence represented in the symbolism of the mandala. At one end of the dichotomy history is an irreversible sequence of events moving directionally, or non-directionally as it were, in a temporal series with psychological affinities to conscious individuation. At the other end is directionless eternity and never changing being, spiritual transcendence that corresponds to universal Wholeness. Mircea Eliade in The Myth of Eternal Return (or Cosmos and History) argues that archaic societies, though conscious of certain forms of history made every effort to disregard it in favor of times archetypal cycle, a revolt against historical time with various parallels to transcendent abstraction in contemporary art. At the same time Eliade points out, the recurrence of events within historic time and the discovery of historical man as one who makes himself within history reflect variations of periodicity among a vast array of devaluative historicisms (Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche) that constitute philosophies of finitude despite their cyclic modalities.

Along these lines are twentieth century visions of time conceived as historic rupture and fragmentation. For Sylviane Agacinski, modern consciousness represents a unique form of temporality that renounces eternity in favor of increasingly unstable shifts towards Benjamins One Way Street, the blind oblivion and endless interlacing of the irreversible and the repetitive incapable of either past or future orientation.

As an alternative to the exclusive valorization of what lasts, what remains, or what could one day come to completion, we may have no other choice anymore but to accept the passing, even to commend the futile. Having become strangers to the ancient dreams, it remains for us to consider passingness, to accept the lightness of what passes.

Paradoxically in Agacinskis discourse of Time Passing we may also locate intimations of art by means of her acknowledgement of images emerging from the shadows of a transitory world that can become capable of truth. More importantly she identifies Platos transient illusions, present in the Parable of the Cave, as participating in incessant movements or sequences that in their mobility constitute a suspension of time. For the purposes of De Chiricos lithographs for Calligrammes, for which temporal and historic fragmentation may be considered paramount, we will find that it is more the movement (the metamorphosis or flux) of the eternal than the substance of the ephemeral that will be seen to comprise an affirmation of being situated between the two polarities of cosmos and chaos, light and shadow, permanence and change. Such an emphasis echoes pre-Socratic ideas of becoming espoused in Heraclitus fragmentary passages, inherently anhistoric conceptions of time that are in close proximity to the timeless cyclicality and centeredness of Oriental philosophies. These allusions are redoubled in De Chiricos own writings of the period, beginning with the group of Frammenti (titled by the artist) corresponding to the war years in Ferrara from 1916-1918 containing the poem Frammento, its stanzas burdened by the repetitive: sono un immobile ipotecato (I am an immobile hypothetical); and sustained in his literary fragments collected by Waldemar George in Le fils de lingnieur of 1928. It is perhaps worth noting that in the same year that De Chiricos lithographs for Calligrammes were prepared, 1929, the first edition of Richard Wilhelms The Secret of the Golden Flower appeared in Germany, a work that considered the highly paradoxical relation of Western to Eastern thought in terms of opposition and partiality.

The transcendent urge that manifested itself in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, expressed in terms of spiritualist theory and cosmic imagery must therefore be considered no less than Cubism as indicative of the socio-temporal dislocation that accompanied the onset of modernity. Accordingly, in retrospect, both the pre-war spiritualist momentum of mysticism, as well as post-war essentialism and transcendental abstraction express a schizophrenic historic consciousness increasingly incapable of reconstituting itself. In his Memoirs, De Chirico idealized the nineteenth century as one of hysteria, impotence in the plastic and creative fields, envy, snobbery, mechanization, agitation, stupidity, cruelty and the total lack of balance and integral thought.

Seen from this promontory, a sense of pathos (Abacinskis foretaste of mourning) seems to accompany invocations of colossal mythic archetypes (the Hegelian belief in le voyant, the visionary artist-philosopher who could penetrate truth) as well as the anachronistic promise of harmony and cosmic order to appear in purified abstraction. Despite aspirations to the contrary Calligrammes reveals much of the melancholic foreboding that lurks beneath the surface of activist intellectual exuberance, while at the same time reemphasizing, as Borges, the possibility of multifarious movement embodied in myths of circular time.

Similarly in seeking release from materiality De Chirico, like many pre and post-war artists turned to cosmogony, mysticism and the occult to differentiate between the realms of the universal and mundane as prelude to transcendent abstraction. Stimulated in part by scientific research, esoterica and artistic explorations of natural light by such precursors as Corot and the Impressionists, as well as by the more visionary aspects of Romanticism and Symbolism, an interest in heavenly bodies accompanied greater experimentation in cosmic correspondence, especially among poets and painters in the circle of Apollinaire. Fueled by intensified astrological, hermetic and theosophical research, cosmic analogies came to embody literal translations of a metaphysical position shared among many artists of the day corresponding to a higher, enlightened zone of astral realization. Ideas germinating in the chrysalis of Apollinaires pre-war circle, largely inherited from revivals of mysticism and occultism of the later nineteenth century, would hold major significance for artistic explorations from Dada to Surrealism, including numerous De Chirico citations in Calligrammes.

Cult of Genius

Even in his lifetime, the figure of Apollinaire assumed mythic proportions among members of the Parisian avant-garde where he was honored, as his namesake, Golden Apollo as patron deity of lyrical poetry. He was hailed allegorically, as the Voice of Light, for he used light as his primary poetic metaphor for flashing genius. He was also closely linked to Apollos son Orpheus, le voyant, the mysterious dreamer and the lover of music whose mother, Calliope (Poetrys Muse) inspired the title of Calligrammes. In Calligrammes, Apollinaire takes the form of the Mythical Sun, the eternally youthful Phoebus, symbol of that intelligence and luminous intellect for which he was highly praised. In the early modern period Apollo was considered the very conjunction of East and West, the solar Logos who united the Asiatic esoterism of Vishnu, Mithras and Horus with plastic beauty and human consciousness. By extension Apollinaire became synonymous with idealism itself, with LAge DOr, and the Arcadian tradition of lyric poetry, as well as the Golden Dawn of the hermetic tradition.

Because he was the eye of the sky, Apollo was also considered the god of divination, one who sees all and reveals secrets, a sign of omnipotence. As the Philosophers Sun the god of Poetry was also emblematic of philosophers gold in the alchemical tradition, reconciling opposing principles of fire and water, dryness and wetness. In Orphism and Pythagorism he symbolized the divine creative spirit, with Orpheus the very image of artistic creation, the origin of Orphic poetry, the oracular voice of poets as prophets charged with the elevation of the soul to its celestial origins. Orpheus song, a song that survived death, was believed to hold the power of illumination, to tame the wild discordant universe, to give meaning to the mystery of life. To the extent that the Sun as a divine principle and instrument of creation became identified with Orpheus and Apollo, the daily journey of the solar eye became a metaphor for writing.

De Chirico claimed as his own namesake relationship to the messenger god Hermes marshall of dreams, according to Homer. (Figure 3) (Figure 4) This association (documented by Fagiolo) is based in the fact that the word Chirico in Greek signifies herald or announcer, which explains numerous self-portraits that identify the artist with Hermes accompanied by multiple references in De Chiricos autobiography, Hebdomeros and other writings. Overtly self-conscious while at the same time self-deprecatory, suggestive of conflicted post-structural relationships to mythic archetypes, De Chiricos brother, Alberto Savinio, kept a small, tourist-variety plaster bust of Praxiteles Hermes on his desk. Hermes is customarily associated with the Moon and with the hermeneutic tradition of Toth, god of the afterlife, guide of souls through the Underworld, periodically changing and renewing as the phases of the lunar cycle. The word hermetic stems from a conflation of the name of the legendary Egyptian philosopher Hermes Trismegistus with the Greek god Hermes (the Roman Mercury). One of Mercurys many roles was as patron of musicians because of his invention of the lyre (the constellation Lyra), the attribute of both Apollo and Orpheus, symbolic of lyric poetry. In keeping with Ptolemys Harmonics it is the taut string of the lyre, in turn, that produces sounds that relate our souls to music, relationships that reveal an affinity between cosmic and psychic harmony. Thus Mercury too was regarded a patron deity of music and creativity, ruler of astronomers and celestial globes, bound to mercurial properties of metamorphic transformation. Appropriately, the original French text of Calligrammes appeared in 1918 in the journal Mercure de France, while Savinio published a story titled Introduction une vie de Mercure in the journal Bifur in the same year as De Chiricos lithograph edition of Calligrammes.

Together the sun and the moon were considered the astral sources of life, diurnal forces of movement and renewal, complementary aspects of reality corresponding to the conscious and intuitive centers of the psyche. Each ray of fire, each solar flare was said to embody the principal of creative action, light refracted by the moon during the hours of the night when it emanates moisture. Thus night represented the repose of nature, a suspension of heat generating flux: with each rotation, light passes into shadow, its fiery substance absorbed by an aura that generates lunar flux; this mysterious path of worlds and beings. For this reason the Sun and the Moon are the principles of existence claimed Bouchet in his 1917 Cosmogonie Humaine.

Mystical Light

In Parisian art circles in the decade preceding World War I, Apollinaire had much to do with convergences between Greek classicism and Oriental mysticism primarily through the energies of Orphism, a movement in painting inspired by cosmic imagery, typified by richly colored, translucent, cyclically mobile, work at its height in 1914. In many ways Orphism represented the crystallization of converging interests in Eastern religion and cosmogony, astrology, philosophy and science that flourished during the later nineteenth century in France, especially among Symbolist poets and artists, intensifying through the first quarter of the twentieth century to culminate among Dada and Surrealist artists in the period of Calligrammes production. Apollinaires own interests in the vast array of esoterica to saturate the Parisian avant-garde centered on certain mystic currents: an interest in light as symbol of poetic and artistic inspiration expressed also in metaphors of immateriality and infinity stimulated by speculation surrounding the fourth dimension; a cosmic and astrological model of transcendence (essentially Pythagorean) as a macrocosmic-microcosmic paradigm of genesis; the potentiality of astral vision and its corresponding celestial (supernatural) movement, the Music of the Spheres, in the imagination of the artist voyant, Fulcanellis children of the sun; and an interest in Oriental (especially Egyptian) religion and cosmogony as a source of initiated mystery, suggested in the cults of Isis, Dionysus and Orpheus.

Light fascinated modern painters, providing the primary inspiration for the birth of abstraction. It was championed by Apollinaire, who boasted I love the arts of the young painters because I love light above all else Extending these mystical allusions to the realm of painting by the imagery of flame, Apollinaire equated poetic visualization to inspiration. Flame is the symbol of painting it has the sublime and incontestable truth of its own light, he wrote in 1913.

For Apollinaire, the image of light represented inner coherence and the act of creationthe momentary spark flying up from the friction of real action against possible actions according to Henri Bergsons then popular Creative Evolutionexpressed by light as an aura of poetic inner consciousness and continuity in the face of the dead past and the fragmented present. As one of the major themes of Mystic Orphism, light was considered a primordial form from which all other forms emerged, imbued with circularity and universal affinity, an emanation of the spirit and expression of the ineffable lanima mundi. To the extent that he sought a sense of poetic wholeness with the past, his use of light as a poetic metaphor for intrinsic totality sought to express primordial union as an aspiration of the soul to be reunited with light, the essence of immortality. Thus Calligrammes replicates Apollinaires poetry in adopting images of light and flame to transform the dead past into timeless revelation.

Apollinaire inherited ideas of light as diffusions of a spiritual universe from nineteenth century poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarm. As his predecessors, his libraries reveal him similarly interested in astrology, magic, the occult and the cabala, for he collected the works of hermetic philosophers, illuminists and alchemists. Theosophy under the leadership of Helen Blavatsky and anthroposophy as formulated by Rudolf Steiner (along with revivals of Rosicrucianism in France) in the last two decades of the nineteenth century provided extensive fonts of arcania for Symbolist and abstract artists. In this period many popular publications on Eastern mysticism appeared. Blavatskys Isis Unveiled of 1877 and The Secret Doctrine of 1888, assimilated beliefs in universal dualism, the cosmic generative process, and the preeminence of Eastern religions especially esoteric Buddhism, expressed syncretically through perfect completion in the divine unity of the circle.

Linda Dalrymple-Henderson noted significant relationships between Blavatskys publications and the wording of Apollinaires statements concerning the Fourth Dimension, an idealist philosophical dimension of higher reality beyond three-dimensional visual perception, in his Les peintres cubistes of 1913. To the extent that his descriptions emphasize space as dimensions of the infinite as well as microcosmic-macrocosmic correspondence, she inferred that Blavatskys books supplied Apollinaire with one connection to the mystical-occult tradition, though there were certainly many others, especially Edouard Schurs Les Grands Initis: Esquisse de lhistoire secrete des religions of 1889, which contained chapters on both Hermes and Orpheus along with others on esoteric teachings, mystery cults and the religions of India and Egypt. There was also liphas Lvis Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1856) popular in Paris during the 1890s that included chapters on mysticism and Oriental mystics; and C. W. Leadbeaters The Astral Plane of 1895, Clairvoyance of 1899 and The Other Side of Death of 1903, which were published in French translation in Paris in 1910. Furthermore, throughout this period the literary journal Mercure de France included a section titled sotrisme et spiritisme that contained information ranging from Paracelsus to Jakob Bhme. Many of these interests would have been shared in 1908 among Symbolist poets and artists at Puteaux (including the mystical Orphist Frantisek Kupka) along with artists who exhibited together in the Salon de la Section dOr, October 10-30 of 1912 (including Marcel Duchamp), the last collective exhibition of the avant-garde prior to World War I. The vast collection of speculative literature surrounding ideas generated at Puteaux among related areas of hermetic studies, philosophy, religion, science and the occult was disseminated widely in Apollinaires circle, and references in De Chiricos writings to a Golden Age of heroes certainly embrace the gestational aspects of this period. Further, Apollinaires interest in such subjects as the Fourth Dimension and infinity as psychic movement released from chronologies of time and history is significant in that it is linked to an incipient idealism, Romanticist aspirations to the Sublime, and a desire for spiritual transcendence that anticipates disintegrative aspects of modern consciousness.

Virginia Spate considered these allusions to be representative of a fundamental shift in modern artistic consciousness, expressed by means of language, a shift away from the nineteenth century belief in a spiritual reality behind the material world, to an early twentieth century search for meaning within the individual consciousness. According to this interpretation, Apollinaire appropriated the revelations of mystics and their mythic archetypes in order for his poetry to create form from the formless, meaning from chaos, and (metaphorically) light from darknessas aspiration to overcome temporality through the act of creation, an act which depended on an equally strong sense of the reality of the world which is subject to time.

In keeping with a concern for historical age and temporality expressed through the language of remote time, De Chirico may have assimilated various antiquated seventeenth century engravings as sources of mystical imagery for the Calligrammes lithographs. Reflecting spiritual associations, Maurizio Calvesi attributed Calligrammes refracted solar imagery, developed later as Il sole nella stanza, to engravings by the Jesuit mystic Athansius Kircher (1602-1680), in Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1646). Kircher is significant in that he was known for his early attention to oriental and Asiatic systems of religion and was considered the founder of Egyptology for he was long credited with the decipherment of hieroglyphs. His research also provided a basis for theosophical syncretism of the late nineteenth century. Calvesi cites engravings by Robert Fludd (1574-1637) in Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1619) as a model for human silhouettes and circles that appear in De Chiricos Portrait of Apollinaire of 1914. He notes that according to his Memoirs, De Chirico may have examined these works in research he conducted in Paris to study old treatises on painting technique at the Bibliothque Richelieu in 1920. But evidence of De Chiricos familiarity with Fludds imagery appears much earlier in his work, during the Metaphysical Period evidenced by such paintings as Le Rve de Tobie of 1917 (Figure 6). Further, Fludds Utriusque Cosmi was widely known among members of Apollinaires circle such as Kupka and Kandinsky for theosophically inspired concepts concerning lanima mundi, infinity and cosmic models of the universe, ideas that also link Calligrammes to fonts of Eastern mysticism. It is also likely that De Chirico examined many of Fludds engravings as reproductions in Grillot de Givrys Le Muse des Sorciers: Mages et Alchimistes, published in Paris in 1929, the year in which Calligrammes was produced. The author was very popular in Paris among modern artists such as Max Ernst during the 1920s and a copy of this work, which also contained illustrated chapters on astrology, cartomancy and chiromancy, was in Bretons library. Fludds engravings are thus more likely to have provided other critical relationships to Calligrammes not noted by Calvesi, especially self-referential imagery that informs the wider body of De Chiricos oeuvre. Specifically, the frontispiece of the Calligrammes series is framed along its border by a geometric solid resembling a similar image in Le Rve de Tobie that has been interpreted by Fagiolo as a meteorological thermometer, a metonym for De Chiricos self-identification with Mercury. (Figure 5) (Figure 6) While this interpretation is certainly valid and significant for the self-referential aspects of this work, it should be added that the form in toto conforms to the Fludd engraving of the neck and scroll of a stringed instrument contained in the chapter De Musica Mundana. (Figure 7) As such it reiterates in Calligrammes an ironic temporal-atemporal dichotomy that links the microcosmic aesthetic of the terrestrial realm to the greater harmony of the celestial, Fludds Cosmi majoris et minoris.

Calligrammes emphasis on cosmic bodies and principals of duality related Apollinaires poetic universes to theories of harmonic correspondence embraced among literati as Pythagoras Music of the Spheres, ideas revived by Bhme as multifaceted consonances existing in the cosmic movements of the universe. Especially among painters who had trained in the 1890s such as Kupka, Kandinsky and Mondrian, analogies between music and painting suggested Pythagorian correspondences between the inner world of artistic subjectivity and planetary orbit. But Pythagorean referents in Calligrammes may reflect a more pervasive influence concurrent in the work of Max Ernst. Pythagoras was popular among modern artists because he was considered an astronomer as well as a hermetic philosopher with connections to both alchemy and celestial music with accompanying metaphoric relationships to art. In Greek religion, the muse Calliope protected all who loved music. Pythagoras was believed to have also traveled to Egypt early in his life and to have absorbed its ancient mysteries. On his return to Greece and later Italy, legend holds that he established a cult incorporating ancient Egyptian initiation rites that by some accounts made secrecy a condition of membership. Pythagoras also believed in the transmigration of souls and reincarnation, ideas central to Calligrammes meaning.

Alchemy & Metamorphosis

Connected to the mythology of Orpheus as an embodiment of music and mystic poetry inherited from nineteenth century Romanticism, Apollinaire in Le Bestiare: Cortge dOrphe, (written about 1906 but published in 1910), has Orpheus proclaim: Admire the awful strength! The noble lines: His the speaking voice of light/ As Hermes Trismegistus said in his Pimander, a reference to the legendary Egyptian author of the Corpus Hermeticum, the father of alchemical lore. Apollinaire, whose library contained many works of hermetic philosophy such as F. Ch. Barlets LOccultisme of 1909 and several 1910 editions of Les Nouveaux Horizons de la Science et de la Pense (Revue mensuelle davant-garde scientifique et philosophique: LHyperchimieRosa Alchemica), was known to be both superstitious and intensely interested in hermetic arts. His book of poetry, titled Alcools of 1913 may reflect in fact a seventeenth century alchemical connotation contained in Rulandus Lexikon of Alchemy of 1612, a copy of which is listed in Bretons library. In it, Alcool is described as alcool of wineused for rectified Aqua Fortis. It is the purer and cleaner part [of any bodies]separated from the impure by fire and heat as dictated by Paracelsuss Alcool of Antimony.

Stressing radiant, Unanimist solar energy, Apollinaire in a lecture titled LEsprit Nouveau of 1917 described Orphist painting as poetic universes which palpitate ineffablywhich gravitate about the same point of infinity as that which we bear within ourselves, a reference to the microcosmic-macrocosmic correspondence that inspired the cyclical alchemical maxim As above, so below. In the following year, in 1918, Apollinaire gave another talk in which he compared poetic creation to alchemy, an anticipation of dream poetry among Surrealists as an oneiric heuristic according to Poggioli, the dream as the hermeneutics of art. These poetic aspirations were closely linked in turn to notions of Dionysian ecstasy, dream, automatism and initiation among Surrealists, along with Freud and Jungs theories of the unconscious, projection and psychoanalysis and an increasing concern with individuation and self-realization, the psychic introspection of the artist.

Apollinaires interest in the creative process and in the divinatory powers of the artist-initiate came to prominence after World War I especially among artists in the circle of Andr Breton, many of whom considered themselves successors in the line of hermetic poets descending from Baudelaire to Apollinaire. Since the later nineteenth century Paris was seen among the international avant-garde to be saturated with esoterica. By the late 1920s when De Chiricos lithographs were produced and he was residing in Paris in close interaction with Breton, Ernst and others, a great deal of evidence exists that links the Surrealists (as well as the Italian Futurists) to a post-war revival of theosophy, Eastern mysticism and the occult from the Cabala to the Tarot. Alchemical symbolism is well documented in the work of leading artists of the period such as Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, with whom De Chirico interacted. We have only to look to Bretons library which contained more than one hundred works on esoterism and the occult, and to his Alchemy of the Word described at length in his Second Surrealist Manifesto of 1929 for such evidence, along with De Chiricos accounts of sances he attended at Bretons apartment. Allusions to alchemy are contained in the Surrealist novels of both De Chirico and Savinio of the 1920s. In Hebdomeros, De Chiricos autobiography of 1929, De Chirico describes a serpent biting its own tail, the Uroboros a symbol of cyclicality and resurrection. In form it recalls the mandala-like wheel motif, a sign of alchemical gold and rebirth equated with the sun, a constant factor in hermetic imagery.

Alchemy refers to a ritual operation that combines the ancient science of metallurgy with Egyptian beliefs concerning life after death and Hellenistic views of cosmic unity, hence a quintessential model of historical and spiritual fusion. As an integrative process of cerebral consciousness originating in Egyptian esoterism, the path to fusion was described by allusions to alchemy, myth and the cabala by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz in Esoterism and Symbol, published in 1927, a copy contained in Bretons library. Based in dualistic principles of male-female, light-dark, heaven-earth, the process of refining base material (Primal Matter) through successive stages of transformation and metamorphosis was seen among artists as replicating the creative process. Alchemists often considered themselves philosophers, a distinction familiar in De Chiricos paintings, along with a conception of art derived from Aristotles tchne, a skill both theoretical and practical, an interest that inspired De Chiricos research into artistic technique throughout his long career. In this connection aspects of alchemy that invoke transformational processes are most clearly linked to modern artistic practice in Conceptual and Fluxus art.

In Calligrammes, there are many references to alchemical processes as well as to other hermetic arts, societies and esoteric sources. Symbols such as walls, with their connotations of Freemasonry and rosettes with Rosicrucianism; or scallop motifs and shells (used to scoop up baptisimal waters) that evoke the Coquille St. Jacques, a popular allusion to Christian pilgrimages to the shrine of St. James in the Spanish city of Santiago de Campostella among Surrealists in Paris during the late 1920s, all point to elusive alchemical models. (Figure 8) According to Fulcanellis Les mystres des cathdrales, widely popular in Paris following its publication in 1925 and also listed in Bretons library, Campostella was considered the point of origination for all alchemists intent on embarking upon a pilgrimage to obtain the star of mystical enlightenment. For this purpose, the scallop shell was also equated with philosophical mercury in that it identified the house of Jacques Coeur, a silversmith during the reign of Charles VIII, known as a philosopher by fire who had the power of transmuting common metals into silver. Thus the shell also represented another allusion to De Chiricos hermetic self-identification.

The process of lithography itself, whereby an inscription on stone presented obvious parallels to the Philosophers Stone, reinforces this reference. Further, the slipcase, binding and printing inks of Calligrammes were confined to black, white and red, the three colors linked to the alchemical processes of Dissolution; Purification; and Redness, the fire of the Philosophers Stone, allusions favored by Ernst and Eluard in the same period. (Figure 9) Thus the alchemical process itself, known as solve et coagula, separatio et conjunctio, presented one paradigm for Calligrammes imagery, corresponding to a repeated cycle of dissolutions and coagulations of base material (the Primal Matter of Paracelsus) into a new and more beautiful form, the rubedo.

Obscurity

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Salomon Reinach associated the figure Orpheus with orphnos, a Greek adjective meaning obscure, linking Orpheus with the mystery cults of Dionysus. Apollinaires deliberately obscure pronouncements on art pointed up poetic nuances of visual imagery, the suggestive mystery of creation, accompanied by an interest in profound occult secrets of the hermetic arts, notions of clandestine societies, initiation and hidden language. These same interests enjoyed revived popularity among Surrealists during the 1920s due to their psychoanalytic connection to the unfathomable depths of the unconscious as to automatist devices to bring them forth. Fulcanellis Le Mystre des cathedrals of 1926 and Grillot de Givrys Le Muse des sorciers, mages et alchimistes of 1929 shared particular influence among artists of Bretons circle. Fulcanellis emphasis on linguistic correlations is relevant to Calligrammes as it is to the larger context of De Chiricos oeuvre. Fulcanelli, whose true identity was questioned during the twenties, was known among Surrealists by his alchemical pseudonym constructed from a combination of Vulcan and Helios. His writings offered an obscure reason for the origin of Gothic art which he attributed to the cabalistic or phonetic root of the word gothic, a corruption of the word argotique meaning cant, a poetic term Savinio used to laud Apollinaire (see below). Moreover, he added, dictionaries define argot as a language peculiar to all individuals who wish to communicate their thoughts without being understood by outsiders. Thus it certainly is a spoken cabala. Importantly, Fulcanelli described the argotiers, those who use this language, as the hermetic descendents of the Argonauts, who manned the ship Argowho spoke the langue argotiqueour langue verte (green language or slang)--while sailing towards the felicitous shores of Colchos to win the famous Golden Fleece. De Chiricos art often depicts the subject of the Argonauts as it also organizes paintings around the Veronese green familiar in his Portrait of Apollinaire. These features help us identify aspects of le langue sacre described by mile Soldi as le mouvement intelligent, communicated among initiates by means of esoteric devices. One such linguistic puzzle is presented in De Chiricos explorations of chir-omancy and Kir-cher-iana, cryptic extensions of selfhood by the initial X, the Greek letter Chi in some of his paintings that correspond to the letters of his name. These allusions would have echoed Fulcanellis description of cant as the language of a minority of individuals living outside accepted laws, conventions, customs and etiquette. The term voyous (street-arabs) that is to say voyants (seers) was applied to them as the even more expressive term sons or children of the sun, related to Calligrammes solar metaphor. If Gothic art was for Fulcanelli the art got or cot (xo)the art of light or of the spirit, then Calligrammes represented its De Chirichean emanation. To emphasize the cultic aspects of this artists society, it is striking to note that on one of the pages of the Calligrammes volume in the Beinecke Library of Yale University there is a crossword disposition of the words Le Culte de Apollinaire, alluding to this confraternity. Not coincidentally perhaps, by 1927 douard Schurs Les Grands Initis reached the one hundredth edition.

Though in his Memoirs De Chirico derided Bretons initiates as esoteric pompiers, his own Greek philosophical heritage was intricately intertwined with secret societies, cults and the mystical currents of the day by means of a self-professed bio-mythology, noted by Paolo Baldacci and Giovanni Lista, that traced his lineage based on the family name, KRKYES, to the pre-Socratic philosopher/cosmologist, Heraclitus of Ephesus, known throughout history as the Obscure, and considered by some to be the most subjective and modern poet of antiquity. Heraclitus, whose maxim nature loves to hide, aptly characterized De Chiricos penchant for enigmatic codings. As a Pre-Socratic Ionian who chose to speak in tones of prophecy evocative of the Delphic Oracle, Heraclitus shared with the alchemists a propensity for wordplay, syntactic ambiguity and riddles structured around a cyclical, transformational model. For the ancient Heraclitus the Ephesian was called clever through the obscurity of his words, records Fragment #126, reflecting Heraclitus predilection for intuitive association rather than linear argument. Baldacci has shown that De Chiricos belief in his own divinatory powers, his gift of epopteia, reflects the superior vision that is the final step of the cultic initiate in the worship of Heraclitus, a typically Greek (Platonic) mental process that accompanies intuition and revelation, one that establishes an opposition between visible things (phaner) and invisible things(dela), a quest for essence that Baldacci equated with mysticism. It is for this reason that Baldacci identified De Chirico with Heraclitus, for he considered his activity as an artist to be synonymous with an ecstatic reenactment of the spectacle of a rite of initiation as practiced by the mystery cults. Analogously, the artist conducts himself according to the same procedures used by the ancient sages and earliest philosophers. This interpretation of De Chirico cum Heraclitus is further supported by the broader iconography of the geometric solid appearing in the Calligrammes series (cited earlier) as an allusion to De Chiricos self-identification with the god Mercury. For the letters AIDEL in the painting Le Rve de Tobie of 1917 refer to cabbalistic shadow, hermetic and invisible truths and parallel Surrealist introspection. Thus this semblance of a temple pylon signifies initiation and obscurity. These allusions accompany other themes in De Chiricos broader oeuvre such as representations of the mythic Dioscuri (the obscure gods), concurrent signs for DeChirico and his alter ego.

Fire and Flux

Heraclitus over the ages influenced numerous writers and philosophers from Plato to T.S. Eliot, Hegel and Nietzsche. Compared as a poet to Orpheus, he was known to De Chiricos generation as a Pre-Socratic philosopher, one of a group of early Greek thinkers from the sixth century B. C. E. who pre-dated the scientific (empirical) tradition that had begun to spread from Miletus to other cities in Asia Minor. This scientific culture was something quite new in Heraclitus day, still restricted to a small group of proponents within a wider culture of popular customs, mysticism and Homeric poets. An Italian edition of Heraclitus Cosmic Fragments published in 1910 that may have been known to De Chirico contained an essay by Emilio Bodrero that identified the philosopher as one who reconciled mystic doctrines, such as the worship of the sun in Egyptian religion with Western philosophy to achieve greater universality. Bodrero described this period as one of virgin consciousness and spontaneity, representing a fresh field of liberal pre-scientific speculation that predated the intellectual tradition of superimposed philosophies, arguments, adhesions and canons. Heraclitus originality can only be fully appreciated in light of a distinction, clear to De Chiricos generation but less so to Heraclitus, between the scientific and the pre-empirical traditions.

The radical difference between the two traditions accounts for Heraclitus ideological position between two opposing cultures, where his role as a sage was considered a bridge between two antithetical belief systems. This position is reiterated in the geographical setting of Ephesus, located at the juncture of the East and the West. De Chirico, who was born in Volos, Thessaly in 1888, may have identified with a similar point of origin situated at the border between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Heraclitus association with the Turkish city of Ephesus, a great seaport, the largest in the Aegean in late antiquity and the most fertile, would have also been significant to artists as the center of the cult of Artemis. An ancient port, Ephesus harbor near the Temple of Artemis gradually became unusable due to alluvial silt deposits, creating marshes that contributed over time to malarial conditions and the decline of the city under the Ottomans.

In De Chiricos writings of the 1920s references to Heraclitus are especially numerous (as well as accounts of frequent illnesses and intestinal disturbances). In the first issue of Valori Plastici the Italian art journal published between 1918 and 1921 co-edited by De Chirico, he quotes Heraclitus admonition to discover the demon in every house, a charge repeated in an article of 1922 on the painter Giorgio Morandi; in 1926 in the Preface to a Catalogue for an exhibit in Paris by Filippo de Pisis (significant in light of other iconographic relationships discussed below); and again in 1927 in the Bulletin de lEffort Moderne in an article titled Statues, Meubles, Generaux. These references also reinforce De Chiricos post-war allusions to historicity through the house metaphor to represent mental structures haunted by the ghosts of past occupants, reflected also in his brothers novel La casa ispirata (The Haunted House) of 1925.

Heraclitus suggestive style, comprised of disconnected poetic fragments that comment on natural phenomena, divinity, the spirit and the celestial firmament unfolding in the manner of a great truth where the sense of what has gone before is continually enriched by its echo in what follows was regarded even among classicists as an artistic design of interlocking imagery and ideas. In it Heraclitus penchant for enigmatic phrases, quotations, word play, phonetic resonance and syntactical ambiguity presented supple challenges, punctuated by sarcasm and irony. These effects, consisting of fragmentary aphorisms and passages combined within the meandering (temporal) yet disjointed structure of a tone poem, a succession of partial and transitory utterances to approximate visual phenomena, inspired De Chiricos conception of Calligrammes in both form and content. For De Chirico, etymological correspondences accompanied emissions of the Greek root etymos as a quest for truth, coupled with the stem meta standing for changed or altered in form as in the term metamorphosis; and beyond and higher as in De Chiricos Metaphysical painting.

For Heraclitus, fire signified the vital flow of movement, the forward spark to link the interchange of elements comprising his notion of universal flux. (Figure 10) An essentially metaphysical principle, Heraclitus interpreted phenomenal fire as cosmic fire, universal being which formed the source and substance of all things, the combustion of eternity. De Chirico described the significance of fire in Hebdomeros as vitally connected to artistic transformation:

Constructions [] took the form of mountains, for like mountains they had been born of an inner fire, and once they had passed through the upheaval of creation, their contorted yet balanced forms bore witness to the burst of fire that had brought them into being; by this very fact they were pyrophiles; which is to say that, like salamanders, they loved fire; they were immortal for they knew neither dawn nor dusk, only eternal noon.

Fire generated that heat or exhalation that spurred successive mutations from fire to sun, sun to moon, moon to lightning, lightning to wind, earth to water, water to clouds, clouds to rain, etc. In Heraclitus conception, the sun and other heavenly bodies resembled bowls filled with fire, with the Sun the overseer and sentinel of cycleswhich bring all things to birth; [XLII] He believed the soul to participate in the unifying structure of the universe (Sophia) as an elemental transformation of water to earth, and earth to water, a way down and a way up, with birth and death comprising a mystical cycle of rebirth. The beginning and end are shared in the circumference of a circle. [XCIX] In this model, the psyche is identified with fire and ultimately air (as figurations of the soul) whose vital breath steams up or is exhaled from moisture.

Heraclituss exhalations of the universe, evidence of his doctrine of flux and cosmic change, appear in Calligrammes as downpours and evaporations of moisture that suggest processes analogous to alchemical transmutation. (Figure 11) In Aristotles account of Heraclitus, meteorological cycles of rising evaporation, condensation and precipitation were suggested by the allegory of the ancient river Oceanus put forward by Plato, who also connected it to Heraclitus universal flux. With the Ocean appearing in Calligrammes as the horizon and the source of cosmic imagery, it is likely that allegorical associations with Heraclitus river Oceanus were also intended. By an analogy to the cyclical return of the seasons each year, Heraclitus believed that death was to be conceived as a change of state within a continuous fluid cycle (a river-of-flux) in which something old gives way to something new. Thus envisioned as a hermeneutic circle, Heraclitus subscribed to the essential Oriental harmony or union of opposing dualities, life alternating with death as renewable psychic continuities of relative identity. De Chiricos invocation of Heraclitus doctrine of immortality is historically significant, for such beliefs denied the despair and skepticism of Pliny in favor of the Oriental mystics who infiltrated Rome in the period of its decline.

Further, in the years surrounding World War I, the widely noted Belgian archaeologist Franz Cumont delivered lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris in which he invoked Heraclitus on the subject of Greek Astrology. He spoke of beliefs inherited from Egyptian and Chaldean sources that linked Heraclitus to certain Orphic and Pythagorean sects of mystics and believers in future life. In one lecture of 1912 on astral mysticism, Cumont described the spirits of the dead as departing to inhabit the moon or the sun, accompanied by Hermes, where essence as ether is one with the soul of the universe. Thus allusions to infinite nether regions, suffused with divinatory spirits may have further aligned Heraclitean cosmology and eschatology with the theoretical underpinnings of the Fourth Dimension and transcendent abstraction.

In Calligrammes, effusions of the spirit appear as recurrent and wind-born spirals, to evoke air and breath itself, as well as circulatory aspiration. (Figure 12) Reflecting once again the Harmonics of astral and animate correspondence, the spirals serve to illustrate Ptolemys own axiom:

EPIGRAM

I know that I am by nature mortal and ephemeral.

But surrounded by celestial bodies,

When I track their ever-rushing spirals,

My feet no longer touch earth.

I stand before Zeus himself and take my fill

Of ambrosia, divine fare.

De Chirico may also have associated spiral patterns with diverse contemporary sources, many owned by Breton. There was Emil Soldis (1897) illustrations of spiral symbols in archaic art from Assyria to the Maya with connotations of both transfiguration and union; or Eliphas Levis diagram of the rotations of the winds in Les mystres de la Kabbale (originally published in 1861 but reissued in 1920) that illustrated the motor principal originating in the North wind as an infusion of energy. But there was, in addition, a publication of considerable influence to early modern artists, Matila Ghykas Il esthtique des proportions dans la nature et dans les arts, released in Paris by Gallimard in 1927. This work contained a lengthy section on radial logarithmic spirals, a proportion harmonieuse par excellence. Apparent in recurrent rhythmic pulsations of nature, their proportions were illustrated by an assortment of marine shells, the coquillages so closely associated with alchemical contexts. (Figure 13) (Figure 14) In this text the forms are presented as fleurs and their numeric proportions were related to a wide spectrum of mathematical and artistic models from the mystic numbers of Pythagoras to the symbolism of cathedrals.

Heraclitus Mystic Doctrine of the Soul [XCIII], a belief in the essential unity of mortality and immortality surely provided the template for Calligrammes cosmic and cyclical ontology for it honored Apollinaires living memory among surviving members of the Parisian avant-garde. In an essay of November of 1918 written shortly after Apollinaires death, De Chirico implies a belief in Apollinaires spiritual survival by referring to him as the revenant, a word that signifies ghost, or revisiting spirit, as well as dreamer. To the extent that the dream itself became synonymous with artistic vision among Surrealists, such a reference seemed to further prophecy Apollinaires beatification among contemporaries. De Chirico wrote in Ars Nova: Painter friends of bright destiny, we who loved him, shall sustain his fame usque ad finem. That which he gave to us we shall render in return. The ranks have not broken and he goes on to recount a vision of Apollinaire returned: I see, as one sees in a dreamAnd here, like under the luminous rays of a magic lantern the profile of the sad centurion. It is Apollinaire, [Apollinaire the revenant]; it is the poet and friend who defended me in a foreign land who I will never see again.

Fragmentation and Parody

Yet true to history, De Chirico disrupted myths of cosmic order and hierarchy by spatio-temporal involutions. Broken columns combine with effects of fragmentation and dislocation to suggest the alchemical Magnum Chaos, Kristevas sense and non-sense of revolt. (Figure 15) Perhaps referencing well-documented eclipses that accompanied the aftermath of World War I in combination with a waning moon and corroded lunar crescent, the halving and debasement of these symbols, depicted in a colorless graphic medium mirror something of the reductio ad absurdio, the diminished horizon of lEffort moderne, as well as Nietzsches degenerative aspects of historicism. For the alchemists, the sol niger (the black sun) appearing in several of the lithographs signified death and putrefaction, the dissolution of matter to be resurrected in a new and purified form.

In Calligrammes, symbols of luminosity alternate with others of shadow evoked frequently by darkened lunar crescents and setting suns. It is a darkness that recalls passages in De Chiricos fiction that speak of his preference for ghostly projections pertaining to an Afterlife and Underworld which allow the outline of form to be more clearly perceived as in Platos Parable of the Cave.

Notice how people and objects all look more mysterious in this dim light. Its the phantoms of people and things that we see, phantoms which, once light arrives, disappear into their unknown kingdom. The outlines of things lose their hardness as they did in the periods when the art of painting reached its highest point of perfection. I am talking to you as an artist sir, and I can assure you that I have often stayed in my studio, without lighting the lamps, as night began to fall over the town. At such times I lose myself in strange reveries as I watch my paintings sinking into a fog ever thicker and darker, as though they were entering another world, another sphere where I could never reach themI love the shadows of twilightand they make me daydream

The reference points up De Chiricos basis in Platonic Metaphysics as a concern for clear distinctions between appearances and realities. It considers form as meaning itself, altogether separate from screens of shifting and unclear projections, spectacles of deception and change marked by instability and apprehension.

In a particularly vivid passage from De Chiricos Hebdomeros he describes a seismic disturbance a military confrontation that recalls Calligrammes wartime context:

And he yielded to the delight of reliving a bygone hour, an hour of twilight, with gardens draped in the evening mist; was it the artillery at the barracks or was it an earthquake, a seismic disturbance, as the newspapers put it? Some said that a comet was coming and with it the end of the world, as predicted in the books of astrology. Years of ones youth, of serenades by the foot of those necropolises, so white in the moonlightand those truly prodigious nights when flowers thrown into the air fell thick and fast, and countless offerings had been laid on the deserted shores of a sea whose every wave bore thousands and thousands of roses.

Indeed roses appear to proliferate beyond number in the lithographs, transforming the solar disk into dozens of floral patterns. (Figure 16) Now sunflowers, now daisies, now rosettes such radiating motifs originated in archaic Eastern religions where roses, as projections du disque solaire, signified rebirth and eternity and were contemplated as mystic centers. Especially in Persia and Egypt, rosettes had ancient fertility connotations. In alchemy, the red rose is synonymous with the Philosophers Stone itself. It represents the central image of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, known as the Rose-Croix in France where the sect was revived in the latter nineteenth century. Some of De Chiricos roses appear to reproduce the specific form of the rose dictated by Rosicrucian manuals such as one produced in an edition belonging to Yeats. (Figure 17) (Figure 18)

In Calligrammes, roses that originate as solar discs are also bound to a language of architectural ornamentation that De Chirico, in Il senso architettonico nella pittura antica associated with time and mysticism:

In Giotto too an architectonic sensibility attains lofty metaphysical spaces. All of the openings (doors, arches, windows) that accompany his figures leave the presentiment of cosmic mystery. The square of the sky limited by the lines of a window represents another spectacle superimposed amid the personsAnd the perspective lines of the constructions rise full of mystery and presentiment, angles conceal secretsthe scene is limited by the actions of persons but it is a vital, cosmic drama that envelops humanity, containing it within its spirals, in which the past and the future become confused

Linked to delimiting parameters of the frame, architectural motifs comprise the vocabulary of a visual language, a pastiche in the manner of a Cubist collage, suggestive of spatial and perspectival boundaries traditionally defined by means of historic ornament and stylization. But contemporaneously, in Calligrammes De Chirico strives to demystify the same architectural metaphor, the houses and their embellishments that divide or protect, adorn or encumber the artists own interior space. These architectural metaphors appear frequently in his fiction as in a passage from Hebdomeros in which the protagonist sits in an armchair smoking a pipe dreamily contemplating the ornamental molding on the ceiling.

Many of Calligrammes compositions consist of decorative moldings that animate the entire series, their patterns corresponding to an eruption of volutes and emotives in tribute to the poets memory. They signal disequilibrium and convolution as randomly dispersed motifs released across the sky, detached from their frames and architecture as freely as the vers libre of Pound and Elliott. The images form autonomous abstract phrases to accompany Dada sound-poems or Marinettis mots en libert. Indeed some resemble the gears of mechanical rotation favored among Dadaists such as Picabia whose Machine tournez vite in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. was produced from 1916 to 1918, the years corresponding to World War I. For his purposes De Chirico borrowed motifs from high and lowfrom the ceiling patera of Greek domestic architecture, repeated frequently with variations, to random artifacts from the Temple of Apollo in Circo in Rome and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. (Figure 19) (Figure 20) (Figure 21) (Figure 22) (De Chirico may even have wished to call attention to the temple of Sol Indiges in the Circus Maximus as a relationship between the sun god and the games.) He invoked these motives as elevated ornaments suggesting affinities to inverted hierarchies of Dada and neo-Dada iconoclasm, the strange compensatory decorative exhilaration of Warhols Diamond Dust Shoes (to coin a phrase of Jamesons). In like manner, the loose stylization of the insignia, its vulgarization and hyperbole seem to restate De Chiricos observations in an article titled Lassitude, in which he was critical of the declining energies of contemporary art, which may be likened to a distended pantomime and Barthian prefiguration. He reemphasized the theatricality of the imagery in stage sets and costumes he designed for Dhiaghilevs Ballets Russes of the same period. Overtly redundant over time, he returned to the same solar and lunar imagery much later in his career, as tired tropes of creativity and demise characteristic of the entirety of his post-Metaphysical oeuvre.

Indeed the flatness and depthlessness of his simulacrum not only call to mind the ubiquity of Kitsch variants in the Venetian popular theatre (with kitsch an important aspect of De Chiricos oeuvre elucidated by Emily Braun) but other early pop cultural expressions, in particular caricature, through comic strips gaining increased popularity in Europe during the decade of the twenties. The simple shorthand of a medium consisting of a series of episodic frames whose shifting perspectives, radical viewpoints and rapid movement accompany sudden disruptions may have precipitated De Chiricos conception. Zig et Puce for example could have reminded the artist of his own fellowship with Apollinaire as voyager in the territory of modernity. (Figure 23) (Figure 24) With assured irony he may have adopted an allusion to La bande desine, the term for comic strips in France.

Phonetic irony along with a propensity for chaotic, constantly changing idioms offered rich amusements to the artist in the form of wordplay and homophony of both the oracular and auricular variety. Apollinaires architectural medallion may be read as a commemorative medal or trophy for the wartime service of artist-soldiers. This recalls the poets own medal for valor awarded in 1916 as a result of being wounded in the head. But both the medallion and the solar emblem appear in the Tarot deck, played regularly across Europe in the early twentieth century as a card game in which the Sun card and the Moon card held the highest value. (Figure 25) (Figure 26) Since at least the fifteenth century, traditions surrounding the Tarot were intricately interwoven with alchemy, esotericism and Jewish mysticism, and many publications throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century included chapters on divination by means of the Major Arcana (the twenty two image cards) of the Tarot. Papus Le Tarot des Bohmiens of 1889 provided the most expansive collection of ancient Eastern lore, along with theosophical and occult perspectives on the subject, including chapters on astronomical and initiatory aspects of Tarot practices. Some legends attributed Tarot origins to ancient Egypt (identified with the fabled Book of Toth) others proposed a Cabalistic Tarot that assimilated signs and symbols of the Hebrew alphabet (liphas Lvi). Such legends proliferated out of eighteenth century France where Egyptomanie was fashionable. Tarotism was absorbed into England in the later nineteenth century as part of the Order of the Golden Dawn, with the French school of Lvi and Papus spreading eastward into Russia during the first decade of the twentieth century through channels of Orthodox mysticism associated with figures such as P.D. Ouspensky, whose ideas surrounding the Fourth Dimension were known to the circle of artists and poets that included Apollinaire at Puteaux. In connection with the production of Calligrammes, two works that reflected pre-war ideology were published in French, both owned by Breton: Oswald Wirths Les Tarot des imagiers du moyen age of 1927 and Le muse des sorciers: Mages et alchimistes by Grillot de Givry of 1929 (which contained a lengthy chapter on cartomancy and the Tarot). Both works based their discussions of the Tarot on liphas Lvis Chapter XVI of Grard Encausse Papus Le Tarot des Bohmiens Essay on the Astronomical Tarot that appeared in 1889. As late as 1949, the widely noted author and Editor of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Francais, Jean Paulhan, wrote the Preface for Paul Marteaus Le Tarot de Marseilles, also owned by Breton, in which he described the Tarots persistent relationship to metaphysical speculation and alchemy, its fascination to moderns as a mysterious set of hieroglyphs of disorder and metamorphosis, representing a game that he felt paralleled humanitys evolution. Yet the suggestion has been offered that the Tarot both originated as a set of Neo-Platonic Renaissance prints, fifty finely executed engravings of emblematic figures that include Apollo and the nine Muses, the Heavenly Spheres and other symbols; and that its inner meaning is closer to a philosophical book than to a card game.

Many aspects of the Tarot appealed to both pre- and post- war artists such as Duchamp and Ernst, with Surrealists stimulated by their free association relationships to psychic automatism and chance in the manner of parapsychology, mesmerism and sance. (Breton also owned several of Ernsts designs for Le Jeu de Marseille of 1940 depicting the auger flame of the occult.) For De Chirico, references to the Tarot would have conveyed such associations as well as ideas and images bound up with Apollinaires artistic milieu: divination, astral vision, planetary correspondence, secrecy, arcane symbolism and enigma. Imagistically De Chiricos renderings of the sun and the moon closely parallel the graphic woodcuts of the Tarot set distributed widely in France and Italy known as the Tarot de Marseilles. Significantly, a painting by De Chiricos Ferrara protg Filippo De Pisis titled Natura morta con i tarocchi dated 1926, just a few years before the Calligrammes series reproduces images from hand painted Tarot de Marseilles imagery. (Figure 27) Extending well beyond De Pisis frequent interpolations and paraphrases of the Metaphysical paintings and writings of De Chirico, Savinio and Carr, this particular iconographic coincidence is worth noting for several reasons. De Pisis liason with both De Chirico and Savinio during this period in Paris is well documented in De Pisis writings, an association that originated during the war, in Ferrara where De Chirico and Carr were deferred to a military hospital. In one letter to Ardengo Soffici dated 21 November 1916 he recounts his camaraderie with Savinio and De Chirico and their days spent together in each others studios where he speaks of Apollinaire as being with them in spirito. The De Pisis painting in question was produced both on the heels of De Chiricos residence in Italy precipitated by World War I and in the year following De Chiricos and De Pisis transfer to Paris where both artists resided for a time on Rue Bonaparte. In Paris, De Pisis supplemented his activity as a painter by giving artistic tours of the city that certainly familiarized him with the alchemical itineraries surrounding St. Sulpice described by Fulcanelli and conducted by Breton among Surrealists. One of the entries in his collection of reminiscences, Le memorie del marchesino pittore, is a piece titled Gamba di aragosta (Claw of a Lobstera reference to the lobster appearing in La Lune, the moon card of the Tarot of Marseilles). Written in 1928, the selection is filled with esoteric allusions that include references to St. Sulpice, to alchemical colorations, and to a variety of marine shells, walls and roses.

Allusions to the Tarot in Calligrammes certainly point up many poetic resonances connected to spiritualist affinities. Disposition of the Tarot cards may take two forms: in a circle, as a Wheel of Fortune related to ROTA or wheel as the Latin stem of the word Ta-rot; and as a series of paired contraries that face each other in two linear rows. Both compositions embody notions of destiny and fatality as well as principles of dualism on which the Calligrammes iconography is based. Ouspensky interpreted the cyclical disposition as representing fundamental laws of recurrence linked to Indian beliefs in reincarnation and Eastern theories surrounding the transmigration of souls as reflections on time and eternity. Through other more circuitous routes that may have involved Ouspensky and other spiritualists who circulated internationally between Russia, England, France, Germany and the United States, De Chiricos invocation of Tarot imagery in Calligrammes may also relate to theories of intuitionism and Cubist simultaneity promulgated by Henri Bergson, ideas current among the Parisian avant-garde and members of Apollinaires circle in the early twentieth century. These are ideas that emphasize underlying issues of temporality in the Calligrammes series.

Apollinaires solar identification may also bear some relationship to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as a tributary of the esoteric interests of Romantic poets such as Yeats, which flourished during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Apollinaire regarded himself a Symbolist poet on his arrival in Paris and maintained close relations with such figures as Paul Fort, one of the most highly praised poets of symbolist descent in pre-war Paris. Fort was also Editor of the Mercure de Frances prestigious rival Vers et Prose where he collaborated with Apollinaire from 1906-1914and it was to the editorial board of Vers et Prose that W. B. Yeats was named as the representative of English Symbolism. Samuel Liddell Mathers, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn society published The Tarot: Its Occult Signification in Fortune-Telling and Method of Play in London in 1888 and in it reproduced the Tarot of Marseilles images. In 1890, Mathers married Mina (Moina) Bergson, the daughter of the famous French philosopher Henri Bergson, who in 1892 left her husband in London and moved alone to Paris, supervising the Golden Dawn from afar and making periodic visits to London. While there is no direct evidence of Apollinaires association with this sect, his Cubist art criticism assimilated Bergsonian ideas on duration and simultaneity. Following the release of LEvolution cratrice in 1907, Bergson became very popular in Paris among artists and writers, where his lectures at the Collge de France were open to all. Bergsons emphasis on intuition over analysis as a fundamental means of knowing reality favored approaches derived from Symbolism based in a personal vision linked to revelation and dream (not the contemporaneous scientific inquiry of Freud) that led many of his followers to study parapsychology, mysticism and the occult. In addition, Apollinaires largely literary library contained sixteen issues of the journal Light: A Journal of Psychical Occult and Mystical Research dating from May to November of 1907.

A variation of the Tarot of Marseilles imagery found in Mathers The Tarot is said to illustrate an idea of astral light (attributed to liphas Lvi but also appearing in Blavatsky and Leadbeater) an all-pervading fluid resembling electricity connecting thought to thought with rapidity as a magnetised electricity a reference frequent in Lvis writings. One passage appears to explicate the inspiration for the Calligrammes lithographic series as a whole:

Men are things magnetized by light like the suns, and, by means of electro-magnetic chains whose tension is caused by sympathies and affinities, are able to communicate with each other from one end of the world to the other, to caress or strike, wound or heal, in a manner doubtless natural, but invisible, and of the nature of prodigy.

The magnetic fluid is illustrated in Mathers with two medallion-like circular emblems connected by an S-shaped scroll. The fluid is refigured in Calligrammes as an electric current connecting two cosmic polarities. The medallions represent the suit known as Coins from common European playing cards still in use today, with further implications for Calligrammes iconography. (Figure 28) (Figure 29) For played as a card game, the Tarot, or tarrochi relate to the verb tarrochiare in Italian, which means to play with a stronger suit, the golden deniers, the trump suit of French playing cards, the triomphes, to apotheosize in the vulgar. Thus the cluster of associations springing from the triomphes, the golden discs and the deniers (whose literal meaning is currency) combines with the gamesmanship, le gran jeu of Jean Paulhan, of playing a trump card and the production of images on paper to suggest the activity of the artist itself, to which Ren Magrittes Donas, Jeux de cartes, also of 1926 may be compared.

Conjunctio

Despite De Chiricos critiques, he committed himself in Calligrammes to renascent imagery meant to reflect a rebirth of creativity that accompanied the artists return to Paris in 1925 after an absence of over a decade necessitated by World War I.

The closing image presents the sun and moon seated together in an interior space, suggesting bonds of fraternity that unite two forces, light and dark, life and death over time. (Figure 30) It prefigures some of De Chiricos late works on solar themes in which the lunar crescent is rendered in the tonality of the celestial ruby, corresponding to conjunctio and spiritual union. This interpretation is confirmed by a member of De Chiricos inner circle in Paris, the artist Massimo Campigli, in a letter discovered in the Gabinetto Vieusseux describing an orientation in painting in which concave and convex visual forms are meant to suggest coitus so as to replicate creation. The image calls to mind Savinios eloquent praises for the poet:

The only poet of our time worthy of standing beside Sappho, Anacrontes and Alceus for his lightness and depth of inspiration, naturalness and limpidity of expression, for adhering to natural, supernatural and sub-natural elements, for sentiments of earthly immortality, for familiarity with the mysteries of the earth, the sky and the soul, for the length of his vision, his sight beyond, for Olympic melancholy of mind, for overcoming all greed of knowledge, discovery, victory over nature and men, for detachment in life, for life beyond the sobriety of ornaments, for the beauty of his canto.

Through syncretic Occidental and Oriental mythical allusions embedded in Calligrammes imagery, De Chirico combined an essentially crepuscular, demystified historicism with idealistic mysticism. He did so by creating a polarizing field in which stylistic appropriation and iconographic metonymy confronted self-referential allegory. (Figure 31) Akin to a mythic voyage of the imagination, a Joycean stream of consciousness commemorated by the release of Ulyssesin Paris during the same year, Calligrammes leaps of association reflect a tempered and mercurial lyricism. It is in this way that De Chirico succeeded in liberating myth from history to transcend time in the manner of a Rauschenburgian combine.

_____________

In 1905 Albert Einstein proposed that light could exist in the form of a particle, a small atomic piece of a photon. Through an intricate network of metaphoric correspondences Calligrammes captured particles of the sky (parte-cieli as Cosmic Fragments) whose celestial rotation paraphrased the creative process as incessant movements that in their mobility constituted a suspension of time. To artists of the early modern era, these were images emerging from the shadows of a transitory world that yet held the capacity for truth. The sentiment was expressed almost prophetically in Apollinaires lovely Calligrammes poem SHADOW:

SHADOW

Here you are near me once more

Memories of my comrades dead in battle

Olive of time

Memories composing now a single memory

As a hundred furs make only one coat

As those thousands of wounds make only one newspaper article

Impalpable dark appearance you have assumed

The changing form of my shadow

An Indian hiding in wait throughout eternity

Shadow you creep near me

But you no longer hear me

You will no longer know the divine poems I sing

But I hear you I see you still

Destinies

Multiple shadow may the sun watch over you

You who love me so much you will never leave me

You who dance in the sun without stirring the dust

Shadow solar ink

Handwriting of my light

Caisson of regrets

A god humbling himself

How then shall I sing of you who are in every way lauded? asked Homer in his Hymn to Delian Apollo. Through a current of amor sacro e profano De Chirico may well have answered, flowing mythically from the Ocean of their collective reverie:

OCEAN

For G. de Chirico

I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean

Its windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes

Humid house

Blazing house

Swift season

Singing season

Around the house lies the ocean you know so well

The ocean that is never still

Guillaume Apollinaire

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The author would like to dedicate this study to her mentor Horst Uhr in thanks for his high excellence.

Copyright 1956 by Editions Gallimard, Trans. by Gerald Fitzgerald as quoted in ADDIN EN.CITE Poggioli196816410000000164Poggioli, Renato1968The theory of the avant-gardeCambridge, Mass.,Belknap Press of Harvard University Pressxvii, 250Arts, Modern 20th century History.Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.,: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968)., frontispiece.

La stanchezza di una grande epoca che si andava esaurendo per vecchiaia dopo diciannove secoli di complicatissima vita Spazio e tempo January, 1928, ADDIN EN.CITE Bontempelli197418010000000180Bontempelli, Massimo1974L'Aventura novecentistaFlorenceVallechiMassimo Bontempelli, L'aventura Novecentista (Florence: Vallechi, 1974)., p. 26. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

ADDIN EN.CITE Adorno200018110000000181Adorno, Theodor2000MetaphysicsStanfordStanford University PressTheodor Adorno, Metaphysics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).p. 111.

The edition containing the Picasso frontispiece is Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes, Paris: Gallimard, 1925, 8th ed. (NRF) inspected in the Fagiolo Archive, Rome. Baldacci reports that Pierre Roys woodcut copy of De Chiricos Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire [Muse National dArt Moderne, Paris] of 1914 was supposed to have accompanied the first edition of Calligrammes to be printed in an edition of 200 copies in 1914. Because of the war, the book was not published, with the new edition issued in 1917 with Picassos portrait of a wounded Apollinaire. ADDIN EN.CITE Baldacci19975510000000055Baldacci, Paolo1997De Chirico : the metaphysical period, 1888-1919BostonLittle Brown4431st North American0821224999De Chirico, Giorgio, 1888- Criticism and interpretation.De Chirico, Giorgio, 1888- Aesthetics.De Chirico, Giorgio, 1888- Catalogs.Metaphysical school (Art movement) Italy.Paolo Baldacci, De Chirico : The Metaphysical Period, 1888-1919, 1st North American ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1997)., p. 267, n. 78.

The original edition of Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War, 269 pages, containing the 66 lithographs (65 unique images since one is repeated for the cover) by De Chirico