Raymond Abellio-A ‘Carlo Suarès Cameo’

Carlo Giuseppe Suarès, (1892–1976). Picture by Alari @ O S I R E.

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of HYGEIA is a cameo by Raymond Abellio, a.k.a. George Soules,  excerpted from the posthumous ‘Manifeste de la Nouvelle Gnose’, Editions Gallimard, 1989. Chapter III, ‘Gnose, Symbolisme et Mythologies’, MULTIPLICITE ET UNITE’.  Pages 145 to 147. English working translation by HYGEIA.

After the recent presentation of the Though & Work of Hans Blumenberg, Carlo Suarès’ stance echoes strongly with its denunciation of symbols that are long ‘disconnected’ to us, with meaning ‘we do no longer understand’ or we do in anachronical manner without any intelligence of the culture it originated from.

Alike group egregores which are not continuously nourished by devotion and reform, symbols can also be empty shells and become ‘traps’, and ‘lures’ that can lead us to into darker regions of the ego that are only synonymous for delusion and psychosis.

The recent world events are sadly proving this, factually. It seem that the courageous call Carlo Suarès made in 1962 fell into deaf ears…

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‘At the 1962 congress of the Society for Symbolism, held at the UNESCO in Paris, the esoterist Carlo Suarès, well known for his work on the Hebrew Gnosis, amazed an audience of specialists by declaring that:

“…Symbolism became the scandal of human consciousness starting at the moment when, having discovered the collective unconscious, we accepted symbols as states of perception apt to indicate ways towards more exalted regions. By this fiction, we suggested ourselves to discover the Great Beyond (au-delà) in the direction of the ‘below’ (en deçà)”.

The uproar was great. Precising his thoughts, Carlo Suarès wrote to me a short while after:

“I worked myself against the current in a row of scholarly conferences of which the main leitmotiv was to affirm the permanence of the symbol. I proposed a drastic revision of Thought and a necessary  psychical mutation that would break all symbols, whatever they may be; symbols (especially religious symbols) were just but shells that humans-in-gestation must brake-through: Symbolizing thought, thought based upon knowledges and scholarships, thought that builds categories, all this vanishes at the threshold of a fathoming thought deprived of memory, hence without past, which consequently, may join the moving, unexpected, flow of life. Only then can there be creation”.

It is true that during that period, symbolizing thought was coming into fashion. In the three directions of predilection of its territory: The recent emergence of the Sacred, showcased especially by the renewal of compared religious studies, of rites and myths, of dreams, and finally, of poetical imagination. Symbolism was the frenzy that for the past years overwhelmed scholars, all treading upon the trails of Freud, Jung and Bachelard. Within the esoteric community, it had become a commonplace to denounce the logical-deductive reasoning of classical science in favor of the so-called ‘analogical’ reasoning, the source, it was said, of all creative intuition.

Rene Guenon’s Thought was starting to conquer a prominent place, and some diverse methods of psychoanalysis as well. The compared study of religions and mythology was revealing the universality of the ‘archetypes’. Against those who tried to drag it, even in matters of prediction, towards a certain scientific objectivity, astrology itself (which remained up to the Fifties about ‘Influences’ and ‘causes’) ventured to become ‘symbolizing’. In an opposite excess some transformed it in a purely poetic construction.

Perhaps, deeper, would it not be needed to link this fresh fashion to a sudden reaction of a simplistic and narrow iconoclasm that came all throughout the dust of time, and stayed, unnoticed, in the shadow for a while? Simultaneously, as a matter of fact, the ‘civilization of the image’ was coming into reality for the Masses at the cost of the written one, being all the more devalued by the rule of philosophers, who would burden the written word to the structural surrounding of the text, and would also uplift it again, only as a concession to the artistic blur of the metaphors that were scattering its very meaning.

Taking a strong stand against this fashion and the compromises it was immediately falling  into, Carlo Suarès denounced the regressive character of these novelties. Should we follow him on this stance or reject it without nuances?’

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French Original