Rose, the bird represents the human spirit’s longing for the divine. There is also an undeniable sexual level of meaning here, connected with the sensual, fleshy qualities of the rose. The ubiquity of the rose in Troubador love poetry should alert us to the presence here of esoteric, perhaps — as Ezra Pound believed — alchemical techniques of sexual ecstasy. Guillaume of Poitiers wrote, ‘I want to retain my lady in order to refresh my heart so well that I cannot age. He will live a hundred years who succeeds in possessing the joy of his love.’
At root the impulse behind the birth of the Renaissance was a sexual one. Let us be clear about the outrageous thing we are saying here — that the whole of human consciousness was transformed and moved to another level of evolution just because a few people performed the sexual act in a new way.
They made love for the first time.
When we reach the altered state of consciousness that is orgasm, can we think, or is orgasm inimical to thought? We can — and should — ask the same question of a mystical ecstasy.
Secret societies and heretical groups such as the Cathars, Templars and the Troubadors were teaching techniques of mystical ecstasy. Would the hard-won faculty of human thought be strong enough to survive these ecstasies?
IN THE COMMEDIA DANTE TOOK THE erotic-spiritual impulse of the Troubadors to another level. He expanded his love for Beatrice to embrace the whole cosmos.
At the beginning of the Commedia Dante describes how in middle age Dante found himself lost in a gloomy wood, when he was met by Virgil, one of the great initiates of the ancient world.
Virgil takes Dante through a portal with the words Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here written over it. Virgil then leads him into an underworld like the one described in the Aeneid — and containing characters we have already met in our history. They cross the River Acheron and enter the realm of shades. They encounter the judge of the dead, Minos, and Cerberus, the three-headed dog. They enter the minareted city of Dis, encounter the three Furies and the Minotaur. They walk the banks of Lake of Blood in which the violent are immersed, including Attila the Hun. They traverse the Wood of the Harpies and the burning plain of sand. They meet a famous Scottish wizard Michael Scott, Nimrod and finally, in the deepest rung of Hell, Dante sees what he first takes to be a windmill. It is really Lucifer’s wings.
It would have been perfectly well understood by Dante’s contemporaries that this, the first part of his poem, described a real journey underground — in other words that Dante had undergone an underground initiation. He would perhaps have been led through a series of ordeals and ceremonies like the ones we saw the knight Owen undergo in Donegal.
‘Virgil’ may well have been the mask for Dante’s initiator in real life, a scholar called Brunetto Latini. Journeying as an ambassador to Spain, Latini had there met savants from both the Hebrew and Arab traditions. His great work The Book of Treasure included occult teachings on the planetary qualities of precious stones. The uninitiated often fail to appreciate the initiatic quality of Dante’s description of the cosmos, that the rungs of hell that spiral downward in the other direction are characterized by planetary qualities. Dante’s work is written to read on several different levels — the astrological, the cosmological, the moral, even, some say, the alchemical.
In the ancient world the underworld was conceived of as being seven-layered or seven-walled, as the labyrinth of Minos was depicted on Cretan coins. The same idea is to be found in Origen’s account of the Ophites with their invocations to the seven demons who guard the seven gates of the underworld. However, the closest model for Dante’s account of the underworld in the Commedia is now known to be the great Sufi master Ibn Arabi’s account of Mohammed’s journey into the other worlds in the Fotuhat. Illustration from early translation. Like the Fotuhat and like an earlier model, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Commedia is, on one level, a guide to the afterlife, on another a manual of initiation and on a third level an account of the way that life in the material world — quite as much as the afterlife — is shaped by stars and planets.
The Commedia shows how when we behave badly in this life we are already constructing a Purgatory, a Hell, for ourselves in another dimension that intersects with our everyday lives. We are already suffering, tormented by demons. If we do not aspire to move up the spiral of the heavenly hierarchies, if we ‘make do’ with purely earthly successes and pleasures, we are already in Purgatory.
Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray has become a part of public consciousness. We all know that, beautiful and vain, Dorian keeps a painting in his attic, which decays and becomes monstrous as he plunges into a life of debauchery, while he himself remains perfect and unlined. At the end of the novel the decay in the painting suddenly afflicts Dorian all at once. According to Dante, we’re all Dorian Grays, creating monstrous selves and devising monstrous punishments for ourselves. What makes Dante’s vision incomparably grander than Wilde’s is that not only does he show that we each create a heaven and hell inside us, he also shows what our misdeeds do to the structure and very texture of the world. He turns the world inside out to reveal the hideous effects of our innermost thoughts and the deeds we most want kept secret. According to Dante, everything we do or think materially alters the universe. Umberto Eco has called his poem ‘the apotheosis of the virtual world’.
Giordano Bruno executed in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome. It’s often assumed that Bruno was burned at the stake by the church for championing the modern, scientific view that the earth revolves around the sun. In fact it was his esoteric views that really frightened the Church. His experiences of the spirit worlds led him to claim that there are an infinity of interlocking universes and dimensions. He invoked the authority of the ‘Pythagorean poet’, Virgil to back up his belief that the human spirit could travel between these universes, but would eventually ‘desire to return to the body’ in accordance with the laws of reincarnation. IN 1439 A MYSTERIOUS STRANGER CALLED Gemistos Plethon slipped into the court of Cosimo de Medici, ruler of Florence. Plethon was carrying with him the lost Greek texts of Plato. As fate would have it, he was also carrying various neoplatonic texts, some Orphic hymns and, most intriguingly, some esoteric material which purported to date back to the Egypt of the pyramids.
Plethon came from Byzantium where an esoteric, neoplatonic tradition still thrived dating back to early Church fathers such as Clement and Origen — a tradition that Rome had repressed. Plethon was able to fire Cosimo with the idea of a lineage of universal but secret lore that went back beyond these early Christians to Plato, Orpheus, Hermes and the Chaldean Oracles. He whispered in Cosimo’s ear of a perennial philosophy of reincarnation and personal encounters with the gods of the hierarchies which might be achieved by ceremony and the ritual singing of the Hymns of Orpheus.
It is this appeal to vivid, personal experience that inspired the Renaissance. Cosimo de Medici employed the scholar Marsilio Ficino to translate Plethon’s documents, starting with Plato, but when Cosimo learned about the Egyptian material, he told Ficino to put Plato aside and translate the Egyptian stuff instead.
The spirit that Plethon introduced into Italy by his translations of the hermetica spread quickly among the cultural elite. Appetite for new experience, together with a fresh and vital relationship with the spirit worlds, is captured on the page by the Italian magus Giordano Bruno. He writes of a love that brings ‘excessive sweat, shrieks which deafen the stars, laments which reverberate in the caves of Hell, tortures which afflict the living spirit with stupor, sighs which make the gods swoon with compassion, and all this for those eyes, for that whiteness, those lips, that hair, that reserve, that little smile, that wryness, that eclipsed Sun, that disgust, that injury and distortion of nature, a shadow, a phantasm, dream, a Circean enchantment put to the service of generation…’
This is a new note in literature.
The literature of the Renaissance is lit up by the stars and planets. The great writers of Renaissance Italy invoked this energy by the active and intelligent use of the imagination. Like Helen Waddell, Frances Yates was not an esotericist — or, if she was, left no hint in her writings — but thanks to her meticulous research and brilliant analysis, and that of the scholars at the Warburg Institute who have followed in her footsteps, we have a detailed understanding of the esoteric discoveries of the Renaissance and of the ways they inspired art and literature. The translations of the hermetic texts by Marsilio Ficino talked of the fashioning of images in esoteric terms: ‘Our spirit, if it has been intent upon the work and upon the stars through imagination and emotion, is joined together with the
