DO IT WITH LAUGHTER, AND DO IT WITH TEARS
You got what they call the immortal spirit
You can feel it all night, you can feel it in the morn' It creeps in your body the day you were born
One strike of lightning is all that I need
And a blast of ‘lectricity that runs at top speed
Shimmy your ribs, I'll stick in the knife
Gonna jump-start my creation to life
I want to bring someone to life, turn back the years
Do it with laughter, and do it with tears…
My Own Version of You - Bob Dylan
‘The Seer’, a short book by Lars Muhl about his spiritual teacher, a Danish clairvoyant and healer who took the name ‘Calle de Montségur’ and spent most of his later life in southwestern France, abounds in visionary and symbolic experiences, initiations, and musings about the Cathars and the Holy Grail. Reminiscent in some respects of the writings of Gurdjieff and Hermann Hesse, it is engaging and interesting, although the credibility of its details may be moot. Muhl became the Seer’s apprentice after being cured by Calle of a longstanding mysterious illness, and he spent a few years being taught by him. He also developed a deep interest in the healing practices of the Essenes, ancient religious communities in Israel about whom much is speculated but little is definitively known. According to Muhl the Essenes were healers, prophets, astronomers, astrologers, and vegetarians, their beliefs informed by Zoroastrianism, Chaldean religion, Egyptian mystery schools, and possibly by Buddhism. There seems to have been a close connection with teachings that are now known as Gnosticism. Muhl is of the opinion that the scrolls which were found in the 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea are Essene and, more debatably, that those from Nag Hammadi come from the same source. He suggests that Jesus, whom he refers to as Yeshua, the Aramaic form of the name, was initiated in the Essene tradition, from which his teachings were derived.
After reading ‘The Seer’ I turned to ‘The Nag Hammadi Library in English’, which contains translations of Coptic Gnostic texts. According to James Robinson’s introduction, the focus that brought the collection together ‘is an estrangement from the mass of humanity, an affinity to an ideal order that completely transcends life as we know it, and a life-style radically other than common practice. This life-style involved giving up all the goods that people usually desire and longing for an ultimate liberation’. The texts in the library, he writes, have much in common ‘with primitive Christianity, with eastern religion, and with ‘holy men’ (and women) of all times, as well as with the more secular equivalents of today, such as the counter-culture movements coming from the 1960s’.
Gnosticism, a loose grouping of ancient religious ideas and system that originated in the first century CE among Jewish and early Christian groups and sects, proposes that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world that was made by an imperfect god or deity. Considering the material world as flawed and evil, Gnostics held that the task of humanity, based on the example of Jesus, was to turn away from darkness and to return to light, usually through mystical or esoteric insight. Close to Gnosticism’s dualistic cosmology is Manichaeism, a religion founded in the third century CE in Persia by the prophet Mani, which spread rapidly through the middle east and further afield; in Catharism, the movement’s final form, it survived in southern France until the Middle Ages, when it was eventually subdued by crusaders. The ruins of the castle at Montségur, the town where Lars Muhl spent several years with the Seer, are the remains of a Cathar stronghold.
Many writers and thinkers have been influenced by Gnostic ideas; among the more recent are the Theosophist Mme. Blavatsky, the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung, the poets W.B.Yeats and Allen Ginsberg, and the novelists Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Durrell. Perhaps the most important was the poet and artist William Blake, whose dualistic cosmology was central to almost everything he did. Blake considered ‘salvation’ to be the full expression of his visionary spirit; a few months before he died he told a friend that he was ‘very near the gates of death’ but ‘not in spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination, which liveth for ever. In that I am stronger and stronger, as this foolish body decays’.
It may not be coincidental that during the isolation of ‘lockdown’ I’ve spent some time with William Blake’s work, and especially with his illuminated books, whose astonishing intensity can be a distraction in these difficult times. I understand little of his symbolism, but it barely matters, as the depth and richness of his inner world is nourishing enough. I’ve also been listening to Bob Dylan’s new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, and I began to suspect that there might be something Gnostic about his lyrics too, because the subject was on my mind and I was aware that he has been influenced by Blake, whom he mentions in the first song on the record. Some internet research swiftly revealed that there are at least two books written on the subject - there is little about Bob Dylan that has not already been thought or said - but it is still worth remarking that Rough and Rowdy Ways, a collection of songs about death, temporality, and battles between good and evil, might plausibly be described as Manichaean.
One of the most intriguing chapters in The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus’ rambling and speculative book on Bob Dylan’s seminal The Basement Tapes, reflects on Harry Smith’s classic Anthology of American Folk Music, which was first released in 1952 and became immensely important to Dylan and many of his contemporaries in the early 1960s. Marcus describes Smith as ‘a polymath and an autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic, a legendary experimental filmmaker and a more legendary sponger'. A notorious fabulist and story-teller, he was a friend of Allen Ginsberg and became closely involved with the 1960s counterculture. Smith had been familiar with esoteric religion since childhood; his parents were Theosophists, and his great-grandfather seems to have been involved in the ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’, a Neo-Gnostic sect (once connected with the occultist Aleister Crowley) that combined elements of different religions with Masonic and magic symbolism. Although the anthology was composed of unfamiliar hillbilly songs and primitive blues, which accounted for its extraordinary influence, it is not insignificant that Smith chose to present it in a way that reflected his interest in alchemy, and particularly in the physician, astrologer, and cosmologist Robert Fludd. Each of the original three two-record sets had the same cover art, an etching of an instrument that Smith, following the thinking of Fludd, called a ‘Celestial Monochord’, and their colour backgrounds corresponded to three classical alchemical elements of water, fire, and air. A fourth volume, released many years later, had a yellow cover that represented earth. Smith was consecrated a bishop in the ‘Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica’, which includes William Blake among its ‘saints’, and after his death a branch of ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’, of which he had long been a member, performed a Gnostic mass for him at St.Mark’s Church in New York’s East Village.
Some references:
Lars Muhl: 'Gateways and Passwords to Heaven'
Jesus and the Essenes: An Esoteric History
Bob Dylan: 'My Own Version of You'
Harry Smith Anthology