The pilgrimage to the subtle body: a little-big book by Annick de Souzenelle

In "Va 'verso te", recently published in Italian by Edizioni Tlon, Gallican Catholicism, Alexandrian Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalah, Greek myths and depth psychology converge, among other things. loci privileged incarnation of the eternal archetypes.

di Daniele Capuano
cover: William Blake, "The Reunion Of The Soul And The Body"

If we wanted to follow the advice of Ivan Illych and to write about our time to a contemporary pen pal of Ugo da San Vittore, we should probably offer him the stunted and painful - and at the same time apocalyptically tempting - vision of an immense magical net which, emitted as drool by our finest wits, has trapped to the point of atrophying, much more than the visible limbs, the delicate, plastic and sensitive psychic limbs: an outcome for which, for millennia, all the humorous and horrifying apologues on the dangers of magical art had been preparing us Philopseudes by Luciano, to the story of the Prague Golem, to the agile lines ofApprentice sorcerer, to the sheer terror of The Monkey's Paw by Jacobs - as always, teachings so well known and widespread as to remain perfectly unheard. But in that impossible letter we should also, to a  of course, to tackle a much older theme than our medieval correspondent, that of diagnosis of the specific Western disease, on whose signs and causes almost every thinking head of our culture has been, at least once in their life, a perplexed or red-hot Hippocrates.

Let's try to give it yet another name, for the benefit of our XNUMXth century brother and our XNUMXst century sister psyche: the loss of a clear, direct and articulated knowledge of subtle physiology and, more radically, of the world or plane of subtle being / experience - that plane without which the intellect progressively becomes a container of abstractions and the visible and tangible body a machine. The arts have been great alternates in the time of this inexorable ablation: but if the imagination - which is the substance of that median and mediating plane or world - is not recognized in its essential profile, in its ontological status, if the spirit does not it becomes body and body spirit inimagination, and if the craft of meditation does not find a language and practices capable of nourishing and educating it in a definite and peculiar way, it is fatal to consider it, sooner or later, a noble hallucination, a necessary (or perhaps not) illusion of reasoning animal.

Always in this vein, this time also with some prognostic glimmer (and we pass the implicit pun), one could say that during the XNUMXth century, many currents that had remained underground for a long time re-emerged in an impressive concert of signs and aspirations, with polyphonic intertwining of destinies and itineraries of which today we are able, in part, to appreciate the secret rigor and the airy freedom: traditions protected for centuries by the maternal darkness of crypts, schools and phrenias, sometimes under the pressure of extraordinary catastrophes, have shown themselves to the astonished gazes of the world secularized and lost; in villages and metropolises humble masters have shocked and transfigured by offering, apparently without filters, the word of a wisdom that was believed to be forgotten or degraded; the books of all the gnoses have resurfaced, always unpredictably and always perfectly right, from literal deserts or not; thousands of pilgrims crossed the lands in search of the sanctuaries of their fathers, or the fathers of the entire human experiment.

Both the life and the work of Annick de Souzenelle they suggest a fingertip-painted compendium of these twentieth-century upheavals still in progress - or perhaps in a long phase of settling down: Gallican Catholicism absorbed and lost in the family, then rediscovered, like Massignon, in Abrahamic hospitality of Muslim piety; the approach to Eastern Christian theology and ecclesiality; the recovery of the Alexandrian Gnostic exegesis (Origen and Clement above all) and of the Hebrew Kabbalistic one; the re-reading of Greek myths and the great scriptures of the non-Christian East; the rediscovery of symbology; of orthodox sophiology (whose hottest and most brilliant singers have been Solov'ëv and Florensky); the therapy of the modern psyche as loci privileged and difficult incarnation of the study of symbols; and certainly not much has been said, with this poor list, of the spiritual adventure of this ninety-seven year old still valiantly engaged in the hermeneutic struggle with the angel of the Holy Book. Who has never tasted the joy of her page, take one of her many books, rightly loved and ruminated by a vast monastery - especially of "Frontier Christians": it can begin by following the breath of inclination, because in them the progression of the journey is never separated from the circularity of the meditative and contemplative opening.

The publishing house Tlön, which is also a critical thinking workshop, of revising Hillmanian philosophical pop and demanding together, he released in 2016 Go towards you. The divine vocation of man, one of the author's last works: in addition to pointing out Antonio Miranda's competent and sensitive translation and the elegance of the dress, we invite you to a reading that attempts to relearn, of course with a hermetic grain of salt, the ancient art of quiet and patient savoring of the written word - an art which de Souzenelle can once again train the pure in heart.

The author's biblical exegesis puts in place a toolbox with an apparently disconcerting variety: the rules of kabbalistic deconstruction, applied with playful and serious freedom, coexist with an Eastern-Christian approach in which the gnosis of stromata of Clement and the orthodox theology of theandria (the divine-humanity revealed in Christ) do not disdain to collaborate closely; quotes from Taoist or Iranian masters, references to Greek myth and depth psychology, instruments sometimes handled with happy ingenuity and without regard for the specific cultural depth - this richness at first intoxicating and perhaps irritating soon reveals a unitary design, a telos defined, a fully conscious tension.

The work on the letter of the Book aims to extract from it, by breaking the seals of devout or cultured habit, the mercury of the infinite symbolic resonance, which matures in the gold of wisdom: that specific symbolism of the human body (title of the author's most successful work), archaic and therefore more and more current, more and more "in place" than any modern, who knows how to see again, in the limbs of flesh and in the invisible, impalpable ones, of the psyche and of the mind, the keyboard of archetypes, the place of the manifestation of what was once said to be divine. The tree of life and the tree of knowledge from the tale of Genesis they are the very body of Adam, the unfolding and incarnation of the supreme alphabet, that of the sefiroth kabbalistic - the ten original emanations of the ineffable Absolute, En Sof.

Adam, universe fallen apart, is the "divine in the blood" (the name Adam consists of the letter Alef, symbol of divine Oneness, and from the word women, "Blood", seat of the animal life breath), the "mutant" of creation, according to a hermetic intuition that reaches as far as Pico and crosses all the ancient and modern mystery wisdom: its transformation is the alchemical and eschatological transmutation of the cosmos itself, it is the humanation of God simultaneous with the divinization of man, of which the Fathers of the Church speak; and if the words repeated so often by gnosis sound, with their hieratic and initiatory aura, too distant from our body and soul long deprived of the dew of the symbol, de Souzenelle knows how to offer them with the freshness of a passionate conversation between friends , among researchers: where, as you would like to note, the first meaning of the term homily echoes, homily, association of life, companionship-communion, conversation.

The call of Abraham, the pilgrim from Harran, son of a "builder of idols" and father of three religions (in which the dialectic between election and philoxenia has always been terrible, often exhilarating) - is modulated by the divine voice, intimate and remote, in the words Lekh lekha: "Go, go away" - from your land, from your people, from your father's house. Kabbalistic exegesis has always auscultated another reading: "Go towards you", le-kha. The exodus from family, social, national identity, the journey to "the land that I will show you", is a journey towards the self, towards an I that, in the exit-return, is a you.

Taking off the masks, the persona necessary and transient, the traveler walks through the desert hanging on a voice - because the desert (midbar) is the place of the word (beaver). Going towards the land of the promise, he goes towards himself and returns to the fullness of Adam, that is, he migrates towards the messianic consummation: he recovers the transparency of the symbol, nourishes the angels and is nourished by them.. The Jewish tradition, the qabbalah, attributes to Abraham the Sefer Yetzirah, the book that teaches the grammar of creation, the grammar of the body. A text that, if desired, could teach us many things about our age, a time of high magic still largely unconscious.

Bold, lively, cordial words like de Souzenelle's can awaken many dormant sparks, and to guard the central fire of history above or below its multiple deluge.