Anyone interested in the significance of certain contemporary events could not help but be struck by the Solzhenitsyn[1] phenomenon. The triptych that formed the central panel of my last exhibition[2], an exhibition dedicated to Solzhenitsyn, intends to translate into graphic visual forms the metaphysical, supra-historical meaning of the historical moment that modern man is going through. Solzhenitsyn's personality—along with his work—is taken as a symbol of modern man's salvation, transfiguration, and resurrection from the inferno in which he was led by the dramatic experience of the heresies of the Proletarian Era, heresies that culminated in the overthrow and annulment of traditional values by a Stalinist type of totalitarian autarchy.
The first composition, entitled “The Hermetic Prophet”, represents traditional wisdom[3], as well as the Golden Age of mankind, in which the balance of man—both as person and as society—was maintained due to this wisdom, revealed to man from the beginning of history.
As can be seen, I did not refer to what is meant by “prophet” in the Old Testament.
In all the great religions there have been “prophets”, in the sense of being chosen or sent with a special mission, to give a certain impulse, to warn of deviation from or to lead onto the right path and to serve as intermediaries between the world of mystery and that of creation. I chose a symbolism related to Hermes[4] because it is a more general principle, not limited to Greek mythology—even if I used the Greek name of this principle—and because most modern thinkers[5] interested in a cultural renewal of man on a traditional basis, have shown that the solution must be sought on the “hermetic path”.
Hermes, Mercurius, or Thoth Trismegistus, appears from the earliest Egyptian texts as a messenger, a substitute or "vicar" of the great God. He represents His creative Word, "the thought of Ptah" (the supreme god of Memphis). He then becomes the bearer of the Word revealed through the prophets, the master of the books, the one who gave man the signs of writing, the one who gave the names of things and beings and defined their essences. One can therefore see the striking resemblance between this theological archetype and the "Word" as the second person of the Christian Trinity, as well as the resemblance to the third person, through whom the Word becomes incarnate and who "speaks through the prophets."
Hermes is thus the mediator (born of Zeus and the nymph Maia, a non-immortal smaller deity), the psychagogue[6] or guide of the initiates (he is with Heracles when, like Christ, he descends into Hell) and like Prometheus (whose nephew he is[7]), he is the one who "takes the sky by storm" (to use the evangelical expression), when he steals the oxen of Apollo or the tendons of Zeus captured by Typhon[8].
The epistemological importance of the hermetic principle lies in what differentiates it from Western-type thinking, which is focused on the dualistic separation between subject and object, on Aristotelian objectivist rationalism, developed and amplified by Cartesian and Kantian dualism (abysmally separating "the thing-in-itself” from “forms of knowledge”). In contrast, hermeticism emphasizes the unitary integration of man into the cosmos, emphasizing the correspondences and similarity that "mediate" between subject and object, between man as microcosm and universe as macrocosm, going through all the "sympathies" that link minerals, plants, and stars.
The hermetic principle has been more consistent in the Christian East, where the Platonic doctrine of "participation" has predominated, than in the West, where Aristotelian science has become official dogma. That is why the figure of the sage in our composition is a stylization after a model of a Byzantine saint. Above this head there is a passage to other eyes, those of the spirit, between which the unifying feature is the Mercurial symbol having at its center the symbol of alchemical fire, the condition of any transmutation.
Next to the left, above a pointing finger, is the celestial globe, an allusion to the "old teacher" of Eminescu[9] and to the verse from his Letter I:
Yet the universe unbound is ‘round the fingers of his hands[10]
With its roots in this globe, a cross of the four elements rises, dominated by the triangle of fire (alchemical sulfur), surrounded by the two snakes of the caduceus (allusion to the mercurial, aquatic principle), in which the wings show the phase of sublimation and exaltation.
Beneath the celestial globe, the solar and lunar symbols hold the unfolding of a band with black and white streaks (days and nights), showing the "qualified" nature of time, organically divided into cycles, and guided by the law of numbers:
Just as Atlas, who could shoulder Heaven’s arc in days of old,
Both this world and time eternal in one number he can hold.[10]
In the West, the hermetic tradition has been maintained under the esoteric symbolism of poets like Dante, through cryptic images such as those of Leonardo DaVinci, Hieronymus Bosch, or Albrecht Dürer, through the sculptures of Romanesque or Gothic cathedrals and through the writings of mystics (always suspicious in the face of the Church) such as Arnold de Villanova, Flamel, Marsillio Ficino, Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Jacov Bohme, and later an Echartshausen, Martinez de Pasqually, Claude de Saint-Martin, or Joseph de Maistre.
In Orthodoxy, Hermeticism was maintained through the writings of the Holy Fathers, through the Hesychast school on Mount Athos, to flourish philosophically in our age because of Russian thinkers like Vladimir Soloviev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Nikolai Berdyaev, or because of "prophetic" writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky. Solzhenitsyn thus appears as a resurgence of this line of thought, a seemingly singular flower, under the dawn of a nascent spring in European culture, but which, after the Marxist-Stalinist winter frost, in which the seedlings left by its predecessors hibernated, is in fact the sap of them, reviving them to a new life.
The second composition wants to depict precisely this era of frost, obscurity and violence, of reversal of values, in which Communism marks the culmination of a long process of enantiodromia[11] of Christianity, understood as the last and supreme form of traditional hermeticism.
From rationalist epistemological dualism to ego rule, to the hypostasis of man instead of divinity, to the cult of the "Goddess of Reason" during the French Revolution, and to the autarchic "personality" of proletarian dictatorships, the road was easy, open, and facilitated by scientism, positivism and other "isms," which fed into human consciousness all that was contrary to the unifying principle of Hermes: division, bias, and sectarianism.
The elements of the composition are located around a central figure which emphasizes the demonic-animal component of communism: the cruelty, the warlike violence, and the triviality with which he tramples on everything that is cultural heritage. The back of this apparition has two excrescences. One is like a carapace with a scorpion tail, an allusion both to the October Revolution (which occurred while the sun was in Scorpio and was in itself of the nature of Scorpio), and to the later specifics of the communist strategy: not to attack in the open field, but from behind in a calculated way, aiming the poisoned sting at the vital knot of the enemy (real or invented ad hoc). The second excrescence is like a wild boar, wearing a worker's hat. He shoves with his hoof some plates of the law into the head of a man who becomes "indoctrinated" and wears horse-blinkers so that he can see only in one direction. It is an allusion to the pig Napoleon in Orwell's "Animal Farm" and to its "seven commandments of animalism," dictated upon animals after they were "freed" from human masters.
The third composition in this triptych was dedicated to Solzhenitsyn, taken as a symbol of the struggle for the rebirth of the traditional Hermetic-Christian culture, by overcoming the current phase of maximum involution or enantiodromia of authentic values.
The composition is focused on a Maltese cross (it's just about the Crusade!) whose upper branch is occupied by Solzhenitsyn's head and the archangel riding a white horse, the herald of a solar mission. From its head (made like a sun) a trumpet descends, a symbol of the Word that is revealed or of the announcement of the end of the cycle. The overthrow of the dark forces is done by fighting (the sword in his right hand) and guided by the doctrine of universal analogies (the book with the globe in his left hand).
In the lower left, the elements are distributed within the Soviet pentagram, and all allude to Communism. The traditional Pythagorean pentagram (star pentagon) has been the symbol of man since antiquity (as was the number 5). Number 10, the decade, and the star decagon symbolized the creative Divinity. The fact that the Soviet symbol is not the star pentagon but a pentagon built on the sides of the star decagon shows (for those who know how to read the archetypal meanings created by the collective unconscious) the hypostasis of man instead of divinity, the Luciferic action characteristic of the Proletarian Era.
The lunar-martial character of Communism is represented by the Great Prostitute, which has at its head the conjunction Moon-Mars and rests on the one hand on a kind of headless being with a hammer as a leg, and on the other hand on the robot man. In her hand she holds the harness of the "indoctrinated man", like the one in the previous composition.
The other elements, such as the hand holding men by strings like marionettes, the scorpion, the skull, Saturn proliferated by the Moon, the cancerous tissue that spreads around the world like an explosion, making birds fly in all directions, are quite clear: no need to insist.
To the right, there is an iconic figure with a hoe, inscribed in a cathedral portal. It's about Matriona, the character in the short story of the same name by Solzhenitsyn. Like other names in his novels, it is not chosen at random. Matriona represents "terra mater" or "Mother Russia", not in a geographical-political sense, but as a spiritual convergence of the products of generations, distilled in the great alembic of this country.
Symbol of fidelity and steadfastness in faith, this face has above it the seraphic eyes of the vision transfigured by love and the emblematic aegis of St. John the Evangelist, the visionary of the incarnate word, who became the center of support of Orthodoxy. From the head of this eagle, symbol of St. John, the new Christian humanism grows like a flower, as from the crystal in the center of the Maltese Cross (cut as one of the "Platonic bodies"), the crystal of traditional truth and of reflections on the levels of the being, grows the head of Solzhenitsyn, the crusader-prophet of our time.
Vlaicu Ionescu
(An earlier version, in Romanian, was published in Cuvântul Românesc [The Romanian Voice], Hamilton, Ontario, January 1977, pp. 10-11).
Notes
[1] Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system.
[2] 1976 – Vlaicu Ionescu, One Man Show, Brancusi Art Gallery, Manhattan Art and Antiques Center, New York, NY.
[3] Within Traditional Wisdom or Traditional Thought, Traditional Cyclology recognizes the Great Cycle of Descent, Manvantara, of four periods/ages: from the Golden Age/Krita Yuga, to the Silver Age/Treta Yuga, to the Bronze Age/Dvapara Yuga and finally to the Iron Age/Kali Yuga. The “Proletarian Era” is the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, where values are reversed and anti-traditional heresies flourish, as described in Vishnu-Purana (Vlaicu Ionescu, Le Message de Nostradamus sur l'Ère Prolétaire, 1976, Dervy-Livres, Paris, France – Introduction, pp. 30, 32, quoted from Evola’s La Rivolta Contro il Mondo Moderno).
[4] Hermes (Mercurius in Classical Latin), the heralds of the gods, is the son of Zeus and Maia, a nymph, the eldest of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas. The ancient Greeks identified their god Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth and gave him the epithet Trismegistus, or “Thrice-Greatest,” the god of wisdom, learning and literature, as well as alchemy and astrology, which were part of the sacred doctrine of “Hermeticism.”
[5] Remarkable thinkers such as René Guénon, Julius Evola, Frithjof Schuon, René Alleau, Reymond Abellio, and Gilbert Durand.
[6] Psychagogy, a psycho-therapeutic method or guidance of the soul, is dated back to the time of Socrates and Plato. Psychagogic methods were implemented by such groups as the Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics. The method was also eventually adopted by Paul the Apostle, James, as well as other early Christian thinkers.
[7] Prometheus was a son of the Titan Iapetus by Clymene or Asia, one of the Oceanids. He was brother to Menoetius, Atlas, and Epimetheus.
[8] Hermes, the “trickster” god, is known to have stollen several things from other gods: Apollo's herd of cattle, Poseidon's trident, Artemis's arrows, and Aphrodite's belt. But everything that was stollen by him was either returned, sacrificed to gods, or otherwise used to help the gods. During the ten-thousand-year battle between Typhon (last and most powerful child of the earth goddess Gaea) and the gods, after a battle won by Typhon, he dragged Zeus off to a cave and removed some tendons to make it so that the god could not escape and so that Typhon could torture the god at his leisure. Hermes and Pan stole the tendons from Typhon and helped Zeus to escape. The war finally ended with Zeus trapping Typhon under Mount Etna where he would forever be trapped to be a volcano. (From https://greekgodsandgoddesses.net/gods/typhon/)
[9]Mihail Eminescu (15 January 1850 – 15 June 1889) was a Romanian Romantic poet, novelist, and journalist, generally regarded as the most famous and influential Romanian poet.
[10] Mihail Eminescu, The Legend of the Evening Star, Translated by Adrian George Sahlean, 2020, Global Arts Inc., Scrioarea I (Letter I), pg. 94.
[11] Carl G. Jung defines enantiodromia as "the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time." It is similar to the principle of equilibrium in the natural world, in that any extreme is opposed by the system in order to restore balance. When things get to their extreme, they turn into their opposite. Jung adds that "this characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control." Jung, Carl (1990). Psychological Types. pg. 426.