Over time, man has built enchanted beacons to escape the storms of life,
playing with earthly architecture, dreams, and utopias. How many revolutions have attempted to
stop the hands of time, to carve out a niche of eternity! How many shipwrecks have there been
in search of non-existent cities of the Sun? New worlds are always just copies of the same world, as
was well known to the Gnostics from the beginning. Today’s disillusioned and lost man
no longer has magic lanterns of chimeras that can pierce the dark ocean, but tries to burn in the
brazier of denial every transcendent value, every old custom, as in the succession
of ancient Chinese dynasties, remaining under an empty sky, in agonizing solitude. False
rebellion animates ordinary people who would like to turn the page, to overcome the Taedium Vitae
that assails them, but who remain completely identified with the conditioning and
unconscious mechanisms of personality. To dismantle one’s personality, to rid the brain circuits
of everything that culture has instilled in them, to go against the tide of common thinking, or
against habits, to silence one’s ego, is an endeavor doomed to inevitable failure, without a
path to rebirth. That journey to the center of the earth, the acrostic V.I.T.R.I.O.L. ,
which can be interpreted, according to Servier, as:
“Descend into the depths of yourself and find the invisible core on which you can build a new man”.
A journey that can lead to Compostela, like the one made by Nicolas Flamel, or that of Captain Cook,
who discovered islands and archipelagos in succession, dying in the last port, on the island of
Sandwich. Death that must be understood as mystical death. A journey into the self, since
knowledge of the outer world passes through knowledge of the inner world. Eliade recalls that
in Eastern alchemy:
“The search for the elixir was linked to the search for distant and mysterious islands” .
When the ego entrenches itself in its ivory tower in comfortable situations, an unconscious,
amoral, archaic force bursts in, taking its place and causing a profound sense of disorientation.
A scenario of suffering and pain that unites both the nihilist and those who embark on a spiritual
journey. The starting point is the same, but the nihilist will stop at the edge of the abyss,
succumbing to the labyrinth of the unconscious psyche, while the true traveler, whose goal is the
objectives of the self, will see the rainbow appear, as in Durer’s admirable engraving “Melancholia”
(1514). A sign indicating the numerous transformations of the personality, which appears under
different lights, followed by constantly changing moods. Wim Wenders’ film “Perfect Days”
attempts to break through in this world of ruins.
Jean Cocteau said:
“Cinema is modern writing whose ink is light.”
A mixture of lights that is skillfully blended in the film under review and reminiscent of the colors
of the alchemical tables of Salomon Trismosin’s “Splendor Solis.”
We move from the darkness of night, nigredo (mystical death), to the lights of dawn, albedo (white
work), to a resurrection finale, in which a red sun reigns supreme in the sky, representing Rubedo
(rebirth). The protagonist goes through all these phases without letting himself be drawn into an
alienating Tokyo where skyscrapers tower against the inaccessible sky and where
money takes on a privileged role: the baseball team wins because it has more money,
love is won through money. Everything is rotten, devoid of values, but the protagonist does not
lose heart. Starting with the smallest things, he tries to elevate his philosophical mercury
through reading, poetry, and music, in order to detach himself from a tragic daily life and a job that
involves human waste. But above all, he discovers what it means to live without a greedy and
conflictual ego: poetry is already a source of transformation. The etymology of the word poet, in the
language of Sappho and Alcaeus, means I form, I build, I create. For Henry de Vaughan, poet and
brother of the Rosicrucian alchemist Thomas, poetry means the search for a vigilant innocence
capable of perceiving eternal light, through the call of analogies that weave the world of
appearances and finitude. Finally, the encounter with the shadow, that unresolved unease that
we hide in our dusty drawers and that should not be avoided, but integrated, overcome, knowing
how to grasp the message it conveys. The nihilism of the third millennium, which masquerades as
libertarian and hedonistic, actually creates a tyranny of desires, an automatism understood as
dependence on material and technological goods. Shopping malls become the true idola tribus of
our times. A Sunday meeting place for families. Desiring is a passive activity, because it is not a
desire to give, but a desire to have. Its goal is to shift one’s center outside of oneself and is
subordinated to the urgency of fulfillment. Desire distances us from the voice of our soul, which
knocks desperately in the dungeons of our being. The writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald intuits the
illusory nature of the web of desires that individuals weave:
“Desire is a cheat. It is like a ray of sunlight that wanders here and there around the room.
It stops and covers an insignificant object with gold, and we poor fools try to grab it,
but when we succeed, the ray moves on to something else and we are left
with the insignificant part in our hands, while the sparkle that made us desire it is now gone.”
As long as we are bound by a thousand attachments, we are agitated and unhappy.
Catharose De Petri urges:
“Do not let your soul be sensitive to the mood swings of the natural being.
Keep yourself beyond joy and pain. If you let yourself be sucked into all the turmoil of time,
how can you be part of eternity?”
Modern man, always connected to the web, is no longer
connected to the threads of consciousness that Ariadne, the soul, offers him, so as not to get lost in
the inner labyrinths.
In megacities, people in a state of perpetual agitation come and go like ants in an anthill without
being aware of their feelings, their actions, and the results of their activities. William Blake,
poet and painter, understood that the “dark factories of Satan” of the contemporary industrial
landscape were built in the image of a mechanistic philosophy that enslaves human beings
and annihilates the soul. In an era of epidemics such as the one we are experiencing, bourgeois
economic morality, which worships the sanctification of production, insinuates subtle Darwinian
messages:
“Many of us will die, especially the most fragile, but we will emerge stronger and ready to produce.”
In Marco Revelli’s book “Umano Inumano Postumano” (Human Inhuman Posthuman),
an important episode that occurred during the Covid epidemic is mentioned:
“Daniel Loeb of Third Point and Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone became regular attendees of almost daily
conference calls with the President during the height of the epidemic, when mass graves were filling up in New York
on Hart Island, the island of the dead, to ensure that he stuck to the idea that we are not made to stand still
‘and bring into line’ those cowardly governors who stubbornly listened to scientists and closed factories,”
(taken from the Washington Post, 24/03/2020).
In this, albeit brief, overview of the ills afflicting modern society, the loss of a sense of wonder cannot be
overlooked. Especially after World War II, this realism, dear to the progressive bureaucracies of the
East, triumphed:
“The first tractor arrives in the village”
is one of the recurring headlines in the press.
Nowadays, however, the fluctuating fortunes of GDP take on greater importance. We live in
the chaos described by Meyrink in his novel Walpurgis Night, where the protagonists lose their
individuality, reduced to surviving only through a series of repetitive acts, without ever seeking
anything higher. Some psychologists speak of the “repression of the sublime” when the spiritual
door is closed, giving more importance to the concrete mind and using the left side of the brain
more. In the name of science and a philosophy defined as rational, modern society claims to exclude
any mystery from the world. Rationalism as a belief in the supremacy of reason proclaims a
veritable dogma, denying everything that belongs to the supra-individual order and pure intellectual
intuition. Cartesian common sense excludes the intervention of spiritual influences in what is
designated as “ordinary life.”
In this well-oiled clockwork mechanism that claims to mark every moment of our day, the killers of
magic kill, behind the scenes, the winged hippogriff that lies within us and can connect us to purer
heavens.
“Inside every man lies a dead child,”
says Curzio Malaparte.
The sense of wonder is typical of children, whose souls are able to capture fragments of the original soul.
In the Chinese wall that surrounds us, cracks can still open up. The ocean of the unknown breaks its
waves against everyday life: it can be a book that opens to a page that has been ignored and reveals
important meanings that had not been noticed; it may be ice flowers forming on the windowpane,
drawing patterns like finely chiseled jewels, which may be messages sent by the soul of the world; it
may be a celestial symphony that bridges other dimensions; it may be dreams that indicate a
spiritual path to be taken. The law of Hermes:
“Quod Superior Sicut Est Inferior,”
which summarizes the transition from the sphere of air to the lower sphere of the waters of becoming (and
vice versa), is taken up by Arthur Osborn:
“Just as a sponge is impregnated with the air, water, and chemical constituents of its environment,
so are our bodies impregnated with the subtle matter of the lower planes”
(The Meaning of Personal Existence).
But these are distant echoes of which human beings can only grasp fragments.
In the Corpus Hermeticum it is written that our personality, with which we identify ourselves, is not
only earthly, but also belongs to the zodiac. The zodiacal system governs our lives and our
personality is determined by it. The tent, the personality we inhabit, exists thanks to the twelve
activities of the zodiac. Twelve signs representing twelve vices. In reality, twelve imperfections
representing twelve vices, that is, something that has not yet become a virtue. The path to
liberation therefore implies leaving the wheel of the zodiac, the
“painful wheel of life and death,”
as found in a 4th-century BC Orphic tablet. Liberation implies the
weaving of the golden wedding garment between soul and spirit.
