The first thing to be said to those wary of a book with “Tarot” in its title is that this is not a book about using tarot cards to foresee the future. Instead, it contemplates the richly enigmatic symbolism of the 22 Major Arcana — the trump cards — to reveal their compacted insights into spirit and psyche, death and eternity, faith and salvation.

The true subject of Meditations is even stranger than the Tarot: esoteric theology. Christian Hermeticism is a tradition that has quietly flourished down the centuries under the protective shelter of mainstream Christian thought. Insofar as a faith’s mystical dimension is its avant garde — a site of verification at the limits of inner experience — the Christian Hermetic tradition that Meditations at once summarizes and adds to is an extensive body of occult science and speculative mysticism of often bewildering, astrophysical complexity. It originates with Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary author of antiquity whose esoteric texts were of great influence on subsequent Western esotericism. Christian Hermeticism fuses Hermes’ teachings with Christian theology.

As per the book’s subtitle, this really is a journey. The lands we traverse are otherworldly and replete with hyperdetermined symbols. Every reading nestles within it deeper readings still, a profuse flora of wildly sprawling interpretation. Comprising mysticism, gnosis (the intellectual comprehension of mystical experience), and “sacred magic”, Christian Hermeticism suggests a colossal supercomputer of occult intelligence humming in the walls of a faith-citadel more readily associated with universal love.

Unlike other books on esoteric topics, Meditations on the Tarot is well-regarded within the Catholic Church. A stamp-of-approval afterword is provided by the late Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar, who was nominated by Pope John Paul II and is regarded as among the leading theologians of the 20th century. To von Balthasar, the work’s author is “a thinking, praying Christian of unmistakable purity” who has achieved an intellectual synthesis unprecedented in the faith’s history.

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I first heard about Meditations on the Tarot on the wonderful Weird Studies podcast, a cultural godsend whereon two amiable Canadian philosophers discuss ideas and art in a pally, digressive manner that counterbalances the seriousness of their agenda: to breach the boundaries of “official” philosophy in search of a more capacious, re-enchanted worldview. On one episode, the hosts venture a philosophical rationale as to why, against received scientific acceptability, Tarot cards, the I Ching, and other such divinatory tools can seem to actually work. What I took from it is that we might regard such systems as symbolic technologies at the interface between inner and outer worlds… which, to various modes of thinking outside of Western materialist (or physicalist) orthodoxy, are not as separate as we tend to believe.

Much has been made lately of a renewed interest in religion — itself surely symptomatic of a widespread ontological disaffection. Many people sense, often as a result of personal experiences unaccountable within the current philosophy, that the reigning scientific-materialist paradigm simply no longer holds. The reductive, ultra-rationalist outlook that emerged from the Enlightenment and reached its apogee with the 19th century’s mechanistic vision of the cosmos has grown as antiquated as monocles and top-hats. As the planet burns up in consequence of nihilistic science and myopic greed run amok, the world suffers too from spiritual asphyxiation. We begin to suspect that clues to a salvageable future may lie scattered in the past; that, for all the sublimity of its technological ascension, our psychotic civilization may not have everything figured out after all. Traditions, techniques, and bodies of knowledge that once seemed unworthy of serious attention to modern minds exert a renewed pull. At the end point of a philosophical crisis, the horizons of the possible expand afresh.

Until recently, I had no interest in the Tarot. My partner, however, is a dabbler. For some time now she’s been drawing cards from her Rider-Waite deck — sometimes one, sometimes three — as a way to gain perspective on her dilemmas and life-challenges. I observed this with cautious curiosity until eventually I allowed her to draw a card for me. She did so on several occasions, always at moments of acute psychic tension on my part. Each time, the card drawn was clearly linked to interpretations that spoke in an uncannily precise way to my predicament. It was less like having my fortune told than having my psyche X-Rayed — less divining the future than peering into the deep structure of the now. While the most salient examples are too intimate to divulge here, suffice it to say I was startled. To the committed rationalist: all pure coincidence. To anyone with a touch more ideational flexibility — anyone not automatically loyal to strict, post-Enlightenment materialism — this demanded a sitting-up-straight. For the first time, I started really looking at the cards.

The Major Arcana of the Tarot include such archetypal figures as The Magician, The Emperor, and The High Priestess; elemental images such as The Moon, The Sun, The World, and The Judgement; and such famously ominous trumps as The Devil, The Hanged Man, The Tower of Destruction, and Death. Then there are the Minor Arcana — the more numerous cards divided into the four suits of Cups, Swords, Wands, and Coins.

For all the cards’ mystique, I might have gazed at those illustrations for a hundred years and extracted only a fraction of what the author of Meditations on the Tarot reads into them (he uses the older, Marseilles deck). Esotericism, after all, entails seeing beyond the surface to fathom the meanings at once veiled and revealed by the outward, the exoteric. To the Hermetic mind, in which consciousness is the ultimate stratum of reality, the world is not only the objects that comprise it: the world is a realm of symbols.

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Each of the 22 chapters in Meditations is a letter addressed to an “Unknown Friend” — our correspondent is courteous, impassioned, and scrupulously religiously humble. To say the author covers a lot of ground is a laughable understatement. Even Cardinal von Balthasar’s broad theological mind flinches at the book’s conceptual maximalism: a “superabundance — almost too much”. There are finely parsed reflections on everything from Purgatory and the metaphysics of forgiveness, to hardcore occult practices like the generation of egregores (artificial demons), to the Akashic chronicles (an objectively real, quasi-digital recording of everything that’s ever occurred!). Valentin Tomberg appears possessed by a kind of inverse nihilism: there’s seemingly nothing he doesn’t believe in. Reincarnation or resurrection? Not only will he take both, he’ll restlessly subdivide each spiritual phenomenon into multiple strata, everything branching out and forking off and spiraling upwards, via the “cosmic Christ” and a whole Byzantine superstructure of dominions, Archangels and all the rest of it, to God. The author’s range of reference is suitably broad: he quotes extensively from Scripture; his Hermeticist forebears; Kabbalah and Buddhism; Christian-mystic Saints such as John of the Cross and Theresa of Ávila; and philosophers including Nietzsche, Bergson, Schopenhauer and Hegel. All the while he takes pains to display deference to Catholic orthodoxy. He insists that Hermeticism is but a special vocation within Christianity, and he has full sympathy for less rarefied forms of faith.

Such is Tomberg’s level of hermeneutic sophistication that his interpretations often have little to do with the more commonplace ones to be found online or in books about cartomancy. For instance, the awesomely creepy Devil card — on which the Black One looms over a naked man and woman chained at the neck — is commonly related to carnal temptation, materialism, addiction and obsession. (The Devil was in fact drawn for me during a bout of acute temptation towards compulsive, potentially destructive behaviors.) To Tomberg, on the other hand, the card symbolizes the “intoxication of counter-inspiration”. Cue a rigorous, psychologically astute analysis of the dangers of identifying with evil — and of enslavement by demonic “tulpas” of our own creation.

The preternaturally authoritative voice expressing from the inside an abundance of intensely strange phenomena calls to mind the astonishing works of Henry Corbin — a celebrated French scholar of religion who discovered multiverses of spiritual wisdom in the works of Islamic mystical philosophers. Both authors can overwhelm with their arcane knowledge and remote, mountain-peak speculations.

But Meditations is far more than a treasury of metaphysical exoticism. Amidst its profusion, we’re never more than a page or two away from an incisive ray of wisdom that we’ll feel subtly recalibrate our inner being in the days and weeks that follow. Like all books on esoteric thought, Meditations on the Tarot is predicated on the belief that there are two worlds in one: the above and the below; the Visible and the Invisible. Wisdom, in this context, means the ever-deepening comprehension by which we may think, speak, and act so that the two move ever closer together and finally cohere — on earth as it is in heaven.

My chief guide to the unsuspected riches of Islamic thought — particularly its mystical tradition, the subtle wisdom of the Sufis — is a French philosopher of the 20th century who, despite his formidable scholarly achievements, remains relatively little-known outside of academic circles. Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was, in the words of the literary critic Harold Bloom, a “scholar of genius” and “a wisdom writer of the highest eminence”. Other commentators have described Corbin’s special brilliance as “visionary scholarship” that combines “a refined spiritual sensibility with vast erudition and impeccable scientific honesty”. Having spent a year studying his work, I might add that, with his otherworldly concerns illumined by fierce intellectual acumen, there is nobody else like Corbin. His unique synthesis of Heidegger and Islam is as strange and startling as it sounds. Rarely since discovering the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in my early twenties have I been so entranced by an author and the cosmos he represents.

The country with which Henry Corbin is most closely associated is the one that screams from today’s headlines of war, massacres, oppression: Iran. But, enthralled by its civilizational splendors, Corbin shows us instead a land of the most exquisite spirituality and philosophical refinement. Moreover, the insights he discovered there, particularly those pertaining to what he called “the imaginal world”, suggest a missing, potentially regenerative link in Western thought.

The arc of his life indicates a mirroring of inner and outer worlds. Henry Corbin was born in Paris (let’s get it out of the way: he’s a Frenchman, so it’s pronounced Enree Corban), and his mother died six days later. A sickly child, he spent long periods in the enforced contemplation of convalescence. The young Henry had a keen aptitude for music, which would not be incidental to his later understanding of mystical ecstasy (he was to rhetorically ask, “But is it not frequent in the Bible for the Prophets to demand the assistance of a harp-player in order to open the eyes of their inner vision?”). He was raised as a Catholic, later moving to Protestantism because it allowed him greater freedom to engage with symbolism and sacred imagery. A brilliant student, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne while also studying numerous languages. During a period of “notorious asceticism”, he taught himself Persian and Sanskrit simultaneously, having already mastered Arabic, Greek, Latin, and various European languages. After finishing his degree in philosophy, he worked as a researcher at the Bibliothèque National, where he was much inspired by the pioneering scholar of Islamic studies, Louis Massignon. It was Massignon who made the decisive introduction that would set the course of Corbin’s destiny, by gifting him a manuscript by the 12th-century, Persian mystical philosopher Suhrawardi.

Known in the Islamic world as the “Shaykh al-‘Ishraq” (the Master of Illumination), Suhrawardi died a martyr’s death in Aleppo in 1191 and addressed his writings “to those who aspire at once to both mystical experience and philosophical knowledge”. Taking inspiration from Plato, pre-Islamic Iranian spirituality, and his Sufi forebears, Suhrawardi’s mystical theology held that reality is made of light, its gradations conjuring up the world of multiplicity we see before us. To Corbin, Suhrawardi would henceforth be “mon Shaykh”. He later told an interviewer that “with my meeting with Suhrawardi my spiritual destiny for the crossing of the world was sealed”. Following his studies, Corbin became a professor at the Sorbonne, commencing a remarkable career as a scholar of religion, philosopher, and eventually “Iranologist” — a pioneer in the field of Iranian Studies which he redefined through his philosophical and spiritual focus, and whose parameters he explores in the essays collected in The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy.

In 1939 he traveled to Istanbul with the intention of staying for six months, during which he would gather for publication all of Suhrawardi’s extant writings. The outbreak of the Second World War kept him in the city for five years — a period of intensive immersion in Suhrawardi’s texts and the mysteries of Islamic gnosis. The work of this period strikes me as one of the great feats of sympathetic scholarship — a quiet heroism of the mind while the world raged and burned outside. Henry’s wife, Stella Corbin, remarked that her husband wanted to create a bridge between East and West such as existed, briefly, in the 12th century of Spain’s “Al-Andalus” and the Islamo-Hellenic thought which flourished contemporaneously in Persia. From Corbin’s immersion in arcane texts in Istanbul, three decades of extraordinary work would flow.

After the war, Corbin moved to Tehran, where he established a university department in Islamic philosophy. On arriving in Iran for the first time in 1945, he described it as “a country the color of heaven”. He was to live there for many years, spending only his summers in Paris. In 1949, he attended the Eranos Conference in the Swiss resort town of Ascona for the first time. He was to become a central fixture at this annual gathering of luminaries with an interest in metaphysical, psychological and spiritual matters. At Eranos he met the likes of Carl Jung, Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and the American depth psychologist James Hillman, who would write a short book inspired by him (Corbin’s concept of the mundus imaginalis would prove pivotal for Hillman’s rich work on dreams and the psyche).

Corbin’s mastery of Oriental and Islamic thought was matched by his deep erudition in Western philosophy. He described himself as a born Platonist (“just as one can be born an atheist, a materialist, etc. It is a question of the impenetrable mystery of pre-existential choices”), and he called the great Iranian sages he studied the “Platonists of Persia”. These Muslim philosophers had indeed absorbed classical Greek thought, and it’s well-known that they reintroduced Greek philosophy to Western Europe following the Dark Ages. Corbin was passionately engaged with the West’s visionaries and heretics such as William Blake, Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Gnostics and the Neoplatonists. Moreover, his intellectual outlook was decisively shaped by his engagement with the philosophical schools of phenomenology and hermeneutics. In fact, years before his journey to the East, Corbin was responsible for the first French translation of the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom he traveled to Germany to meet. In archives in Paris there exist copies of books by Heidegger owned by Corbin — in which his marginal notes are written in Arabic and Persian! Towards the end of his life, when Corbin was interviewed on his philosophical itinerary, it was published under the title “From Heidegger to Suhrawardi”.

Henry Corbin died of lung cancer in Paris just as the Islamic Revolution was catching fire in Iran — a development he observed with great sorrow. Even still, there’s a street named after him in Tehran, and his intellectual influence in the country remains potent (before anyone cries “Orientalism!”, it’s worth noting that prior to Corbin’s arrival in the Shah’s Iran, university philosophy departments taught only Western philosophers). Corbin translated and edited many critical editions of works of Islamic philosophy previously unknown in the West, and wrote numerous extraordinary books (his magnum opus, the four-volume En Islam iranien, remains untranslated into English). His History of Islamic Philosophy is a valuable work of reference with which to familiarize oneself with the names, disputes and concepts that comprise a tradition little-appreciated in the West.

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But all of that is mere context: it can give no more than a hint of the intoxicating strangeness of reading Henry Corbin. Admittedly, at the outset the prospect can appear daunting. So much in Corbin’s world will meet Western readers as radically other, unfamiliar, mysterious, even suspect. Some might be put off by the titles alone: Corbin’s major works include The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism; Alone With the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’Arabī; Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, and Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran. A typical list of chapters partly reads:

The Heavenly Twin (Mandeism and Manicheism)
Visions of the Pole in Rūzbehān of Shīrāz
The Senses of the Suprasensory World
The “Heavenly Witness”
Black Light in the “Rose Garden of Mystery”

But to read these books is to roam through marvelous landscapes of the imagination — visionary topographies described in a lexicon of dazzling metaphysical exoticism. A sample of Corbin’s vocabulary might include: hypercosmos; the eighth climate; the barzakh; metahistory; Parousia; the Cosmic North; Sophiology; Cherubic Intelligences; prophetology, the eternal syzygy; precosmic eternal entities; hierocosmology; hierognosis; Zoroastrian angelology; superconsciousness; the Night Ineffable; the mountain of Qāf; the resurrection body; the earth of Hurqalya; the interworld; disoccultation; theomorphism; the supreme pleroma; supracelestial Earth.

While such language might suggest the kind of florid effusions to be found inside dubious books shelved in the “Mind, Body and Spirit” section, Corbin’s works are written to the highest standards of French scholarship. It’s as if Roland Barthes or Jean-Paul Sartre were philosophizing from inside the universe of Frank Herbert’s Dune. More importantly, the Islamic mystical philosophers whom Corbin meditates on — “theosophers” is his preferred term, marking the fact that Islam has never undergone a process of secularization by which theology and philosophy split into separate disciplines — are as rich, subtle and nutritive as they are initially unfamiliar. The cast of characters across Corbin’s books is immense, but three central figures are: Ibn ’Arabī, the mystical sage of 13th century Andalusia whose influence on the Islamic world has been without parallel (he is known as the “Shaykh al-Akhbar”, the greatest master); Suhrawardi, the aforementioned Persian philosopher, who looked back to Iran’s pre-Islamic spirituality — Zoroastrianism and Manicheism — to develop his “Illuminationist School” of Islamic theology; and Mulla Sadra, a 17th century Persian philosopher whose influence has likewise been vast.

So this is niche stuff… but only on the surface. The truth is that, insofar as one is willing to take any of this material seriously (and an entire philosophical orthodoxy resists this, about which I’ll say more later), Corbin’s engagement with such figures allows him to write passionately into the profoundest and most universal of themes: the nature of reality; the origins, purpose, and ultimate destination of human life; the true nature of the self; and the mystery of what will follow “the supreme ecstasy of death”. You don’t need to be a Muslim to find intellectual wonderment and spiritual insight in his books, any more than he needed to be one to write them. (Contrary to what is often assumed, Corbin never converted to Islam.)

The first of Corbin’s books that I read, Alone With the Alone, not only introduced me to a figure, Ibn ’Arabī, who has come to captivate me; it gave me a strikingly novel vocabulary and framework — almost a new mind — with which to understand religious experience… which in turn has revitalized a long-dormant curiosity about the monotheistic tradition I was born into as a Catholic. (In a time of religious war, it’s worth recalling the obvious fact that the Christian, Muslim and Jewish nations all fight in the name of the same, Abrahamic God.) Corbin’s elucidation of Ibn ’Arabī’s metaphysics persuaded me that, while he was intensely rooted in the Islamic faith, this sublime Spanish mystic created the visionary-philosophical framework for something like a universal meta-religion, wherein the ineffable divine mystery reveals itself to diverse peoples in their own unique theophanic forms — the many dazzling faces of an inconceivable radiance. Though only some 140 pages, Corbin’s later book The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism took me an entire summer to read, such is its compression of frequently startling insight. While many have intuited the lineaments of an invisible architecture of being beyond the realm of the senses, Corbin, with his restless trawling through humankind’s gnostic legacies, goes further by mapping it out, charting a means of ascension by which those who are compelled to might embark on an inner, suprasensible journey. Taking Man of Light a few pages at a time, I could feel it realigning my perceptions, altering my experience of being alive.

As a writer, Corbin might be categorized alongside other giants of comparative religion such as Mircea Eliade and the scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Sholem. But Corbin stands apart for how, without losing the run of his superlative scholarly faculties, he writes consistently from inside the experience of gnosis — knowledge of spiritual mysteries. Although he is not given to autobiographical divulgence, his work exudes the sense of an urgent philosophical quest fueled by ineffable private experience. In other words, Henry Corbin was himself a mystic, a gnostic, a visionary, even if discretion kept him from discussing such matters publicly.

Stella Corbin emphasized that across her husband’s work, “the real goal is self-transformation”. That is, Corbin did not merely collect picturesque lore from arcane faith traditions in far-flung lands; he sounded out the hidden depths in such traditions for what he called “salvific knowledge” — the elixir of gnosis that he believed enables human beings to discover who they truly are, thereby fulfilling the profoundest purpose of earthly life. For Corbin as for the Sufis, the divine is not a matter of mere belief, but is to be encountered first-hand in transfigurative inner experience. He saw no need to limit his investigations to any one era or faith. Ontologically, his instincts are multiplicative rather than reductive. Occam’s Razor — the principle that every concept should be explained in its simplest form — doesn’t get a look in. Corbin is a great one for complications, comparisons, finding resonances across ages and spiritual lexicons. He seeks the truth not only behind but within multiplicity. Concerned as he is with “events in Heaven” — not history but “metahistory” — he gathers evidence from a plethora of sources to get to the heart of a given spiritual phenomenon. This sees him ceaselessly shuffling through what one critic irritably calls “religion after religion”: schools, doctrines, languages, concepts, prophets, ontologies, cosmologies and mythologies pullulate in a way that can leave the reader dumbstruck. Everything in Corbin’s thought shoots for the baroque. Worlds and dimensions branch off into a dizzying, ever-shifting ontological anti-structure that suggests a limitlessly complex and mysterious “beyond” — a vast angelological meta-universe which the human intellect can only ever hope to penetrate in fleeting transcendental moments.

Nowhere in his books does Corbin lay out any definitive philosophical “system”. Like Ibn ’Arabī, he saw himself as a wayfarer in thought and ideas, never resting in one place for very long nor being content with final classifications. However, certain elements lend his body of work its unity. In one of his many arresting phrases, Corbin writes of “the metaphor of the phenomena”. To him, as to his beloved theosophers, the visible world is replete with signs and symbols pertaining to an invisible world that is more real than the one simultaneously revealed and veiled by the senses, and this higher world is a level closer to the absolute inscrutability of what the Islamic sages call al-Haqq, “the Real”. In the words of one commentator, “to invoke the name of Henry Corbin is thus to invoke the primacy of the invisible.”

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For those to whom all talk of mysticism (let alone angelology) induces automatic skepticism, one way to approach reading Henry Corbin might be to regard him as a sui generis literary figure who pioneered a singular form of avant-garde, scholarly-theological fiction. Jorge Luis Borges, who Corbin sometimes reminds me of, might have welcomed such a reading: the great Argentine claimed to appreciate metaphysics and theology as specialist branches of fantastical literature. It helps that, unlike many philosophers, Corbin writes beautifully. To enter his imaginal space is to be transported out of our habitual reality to an alien universe populated by hosts of numinous beings, enigmatic sages, ethereal prophets. Consider Khidr, the “immortal wanderer” of Sufi lore who visits solitary mystics in dreams and visions; or the “Hidden Imam” of Shi’ite apocalyptic theology who went into occultation many centuries ago and will reveal himself again at the end of time. I’ve found that reading Corbin’s work, which abounds with such Borgesian personages, can induce trances of amazed perplexity more akin to the effects of music than of fiction. In this sense, form mirrors content. Ibn ’Arabī has written: “True gnosis is bewilderment.”

But ultimately, whether one truly connects with Corbin’s work will depend on one’s openness to the possible existence of dimensions beyond the immediate realm of the senses, classes of experience beyond rational comprehension. Corbin’s philosophy is incompatible with the dogmas of scientific materialism that have gripped the Western mind since the Enlightenment and still dominate the 21st century’s skylines even as their foundations have come to seem unstable, inadequate, not modern enough. In an Iranian documentary that examines Corbin’s intellectual legacy, dubiously translated as The Seeker of Orient, one commentator remarks that Corbin was too advanced to be properly appreciated in the 20th century. The implication is that our own century, in which the scientific imagination has begun to harmonize with the religious imagination it formerly displaced — panpsychism, Simulation theory, a renewed interest in mysticism and so on are all in the air — may provide a more receptive context for Corbin’s geographies of the invisible.

His critics have noted that Corbin has little to say about Islam as a religion of laws and beliefs as practiced by millions of Muslims around the world — the fiqh (jurisprudence) and sharia (divine law) of the clerics and mullahs. It’s true that Corbin’s thought is predominantly in service to what I might call his spiritual individualism. In this regard, while his heart is in the 12th century, Corbin’s mind has a modern cast. The inner event of spiritual birth “implies a break with the collective, a reunion with the transcendent ‘dimension’ which puts each individual person on guard against the attractions of the collective, that is to say against every impulse to make what is spiritual a social matter”. To Corbin — and perhaps this only affirms him as an honorary Sufi — the challenge of religion is profoundly personal, both in that he urges a private, immediate experience of the divine, and by way of the diverse ontological schemata he reconstructs for understanding the soul as individuated phenomenon, site of unique theophany. To Corbin, the Nietzschean injunction to become what one is necessitates casting off the mask of worldly persona to unveil “the essential individuality, the ‘celestial’ transcendent ‘I’”. Like Ibn ’Arabī, Corbin fathomed oceans of meaning in a celebrated hadith: “He who knows himself knows his lord.” That is, self-knowledge not only entails knowledge of God, it entails God’s own self-knowledge. In the formula of the German theologian, Meister Eckhart: “The seeing through which I know him is the same seeing through which he knows me.”

Rather than its outward practices, Corbin’s concerns lay chiefly with the esoteric side of religion. This word, like gnosis or mysticism, will make some readers wary. But Corbin reminds us that alarm around the term “esotericism” forgets that, “in accordance with its Greek etymology, it merely expresses a notion current in every traditional culture: inward things, hidden things, suprasensible occurrences”. Elsewhere he writes, “The terms ‘esotericism’ and ‘initiation’ do not imply any exclusive claim to teach by some self-instituted authority. They refer, respectively, to hidden, suprasensory things, to the discretion which the words themselves suggest in regard to those who, not understanding, scorn them, and to the spiritual birth that causes the perception of those hidden things to open.”

Corbin makes frequent appeal to the Arabic word ta’wil: the exegetical practice of following an idea, symbol or sacred text back to its source, penetrating its interior meaning. An adjacent lingual pairing is that of the zahir — the exoteric, outward, sensible, phenomenal — and the batin: the esoteric, inward, suprasensible, noumenal. Corbin’s concern with veiled, interior meanings owed much to his earlier engagement with Heidegger’s hermeneutics. His procedure was not that of an academic vivisectionist, analyzing dead materials into ever more rigid states of unlife, but rather one of intensive, living identification — a marriage of scholarly attentiveness and visionary absorption. He presents Shi’ite sages of bygone centuries as vital, undimmed presences. During his lifetime Corbin faced hostility from within the academy due to his rejection of the dominant academic mode, historicism, in favor of the phenomenological. That is, Corbin insisted on studying a given phenomenon as it is experienced. The ideas within a religion were to be understood as they are experienced by believers in that religion.

The beating heart of Corbin’s work is what he called the mundus imaginalis, or imaginal world. The former is Corbin’s direct translation of the Arabic term found recurrently across centuries of Sufi thought: the Alam al-Mithal (the world of images). So, Corbin did not invent this notion, but unearthed and reanimated it for a Western mind which had long lost sight of it. The mundus imaginalis is an ontologically real zone of “metaphysical images” that exists in between the senses and the intellect, between pure matter and pure spirit. The italicized words in the previous sentence are crucial: to Ibn ’Arabī, Suhrawardi and their successors, the imaginal realm is the barzakh, the interworld by which human consciousness can interface with the divine realm of absolute, inscrutable being.

To Islam’s theosophers, this barzakh of freestanding metaphysical images is objective and consequential, just as the quandaries of nihilism and agnosticism that prevail in the West because of our losing contact with it are alien. Corbin reminds us that in the West our “official philosophy” admits only two sources of knowledge, namely empirical sense data and rational, intellectual understanding. We have amputated the vital faculty of the “active imagination” which is the locus of intuitive knowing and the site of vision, prophecy, dreams, and symbolic understanding. Note that we’re talking here of the imaginal and not the imaginary: to Corbin, the imaginal faculty became degraded in status in the West till it was confused with the imaginary, which denotes mere fantasy and make-believe. Contemplatives and visionaries of all traditions have cultivated this faculty by which may be accessed ‘a suprasensible world which is neither the empirical world of the senses nor the abstract world of the intellect’. In the secular West, it is left to poets and artists to draw nectar from this officially excluded realm.

Corbin discovered the “key” to this imaginal interworld in “the two ages of the spiritual world in Iran”, namely the Islamic and the pre-Islamic, as they were synthesized by Suhrawardi. Building on Suhrawardi’s thought, the Iranian philosopher Mulla Sadra argued that the imaginal faculty, which allows us to perceive the mundus imaginalis, is an organ of perception that exists independently of the physical body — and hence survives biological death. By way of such concepts, the Islamic sages make an unnervingly credible case for the persistence of postmortem consciousness in a hellish or blissful afterlife, each soul realizing a personal eschaton. Frequenting their philosophy could make words resound ominously, words I initially thought were uttered by the Prophet Mohammad, but which I now suspect I heard in a dream: “Death will meet men like a mirror.” Or the stark words in the Qur’an: “On that day, no intimate has he.”

To Corbin, the consequences for the West that ensue from “the loss of the interworld” are tremendous. No longer recognizing an inner organ of perception by which we can access the symbols, images and figures of the invisible world, we fall prey to psychic and civilizational maladies against a horizon of ever more suffocating nihilism. In the “Prelude to the Second Edition” of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Corbin writes:

Our western philosophy has been the theater of what we may call the “battle for the Soul of the World.” […] Is it a matter of a battle that has finally been lost, the world having lost its soul, a defeat whose consequences weigh upon our modern visions of the world without compensation? If there has been a defeat, a defeat is still not a refutation.

In the 2020s it’s hardly controversial to observe that in the West something has gone catastrophically wrong. Corbin insists that our malaise is not to be located in this or that symptom, be it societal, political or cultural, but must be traced into the philosophical foundations of secular modernity itself. An orientalist by vocation and Iranologist by profession, Corbin’s zeal for the thought of the East was driven by a sense of the self-impoverishment of Occidental vision, and the ache of “a nostalgia that nothing has ever succeeded in snuffing out of the human heart”. Although he spent much of his lifetime in the Middle East, Henry Corbin always maintained that the true Orient he sought was not to be found on any map. The orientation his books encourage is a matter of inner adventure, an ever-renewed voyage to realms unknown.

On finishing the novel, I immediately started in on Pessoa: An Experimental Life by Richard Zenith. Admittedly, a 1,000-page tome about a spectacularly odd writer whose life, Zenith admits some 700 pages in, was “uneventful”, isn’t for everybody. And it confirmed my suspicion that Pessoa’s importance lies less in the quality of his writing than in the extraordinary novelty of his inner world. It seems ultimately fitting that Pessoa is interred next to de Gama, the first European to reach India by sea. Although in his 47 years on earth he rarely left his beloved Lisbon, he was an intrepid voyager of the inner cosmos, a discoverer of new worlds within the fathomless depths of the self. In the vast yet claustrophobic matrix of our online era, where identity is a febrile, paranoid play of masks and veils, his strange life story feels strikingly modern — and singularly poignant.

Pessoa is best known in the Anglophone world for his work of world-weary philosophical fragments and melancholy reveries, The Book of Disquiet, and for his unique mode of authorship. The aforementioned host of heteronyms each produced work in a distinctive style, and each bore a unique biography, character, ideological outlook, and even signature which Pessoa — like a child who never outgrew his imaginary friends — practised writing in his notebooks. Outwardly unassuming and diffident, Pessoa was a literary volcano that never stopped erupting — poems, essays, fictions, fragments, dialogues, and polemics spewed forth from his restless pen. But when it came to publishing, let alone self-publicising, he was hesitant to the point of self-effacement. In the final stretches of Pessoa: An Experimental Life, we find him still agonising over whether to publish a book at all (Mensagem, the only book of Portuguese poetry he published in his lifetime, appeared the year before his death).

He left behind a vast archive of work, much of it stored in his famous trunk, and much of it in varying states of incompletion. Pessoa was a champion unfinisher: project after project was started and then abandoned, or existed only on the many lists of future works he drew up for his gang of heteronyms to one day get round to. “None of it got written except for a brief opening paragraph,” reads a typical sentence in Zenith’s book. While some literary biographies dazzle with drama, Pessoa’s is remarkable for everything he didn’t do: have sex, publish much of anything, go anywhere. Norman Mailer he was not. Pessoa’s “experimental” life could no less accurately be called ineffectual — until you recall where his tomb now rests, and then it seems he wasn’t so ineffectual after all.

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The key events in Fernando Pessoa’s life can be listed in a few lines. He was born into a comfortably bourgeois Lisbon family in 1888, which later relocated to Durban in South Africa. They returned to Portugal in 1905 after the better part of a decade and, for the rest of his life, Pessoa would never travel further from Lisbon than its nearby seaside resort towns Estoril and Cascais. As an adult he mostly made money writing business letters for various firms, and in a farcically inept venture, he established a printing and publishing press, Ibis, which quickly went out of business. He had a low-energy dalliance with a young woman named Ophelia, but eventually he spurned her affections. Almost certainly he was a closeted homosexual who died a virgin. Throughout his adulthood he hung out with fellow literati in Lisbon’s cafes, drank increasing volumes of wine and brandy, and wrote incessantly.

So much for the outward life. Uniquely, Pessoa: An Experimental Life begins with a “Dramatis Personae” of figures who existed only in its subject’s imagination. Pessoa distinguished his heteronyms from conventional pseudonyms: “Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymous works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write.” Pessoa had no wife or children and few close friends, but he dwelled in a clamorous psychic world of prolific literary companions who argued against, formed alliances, and otherwise engaged with one another. The three most important heteronyms were the Whitmanesque (and bisexual) Álvaro de Campos, the stately classicist Ricardo Reis, and Pessoa’s acknowledged “master”, Alberto Caeiro, who wrote serene bucolic verse and believed “that things are exactly what they seem to be”.

As Zenith quips in his prologue, “one could say that Portugal’s four greatest poets from the twentieth century were Fernando Pessoa”. Each was as fully imagined as the characters a novelist invents to populate his fictions, only the novel the heteronyms inhabited was the life of their author, Fernando Pessoa. And like a novelist dreaming up his characters, Pessoa experienced that strange necromancy of channelling voices that seemed to exist somehow beyond himself, that were more than their creator. Pessoa occasionally found himself writing better than he could write — achieving, through the schizoid ventriloquism of being possessed by his heteronyms, poetic effects that seemed to him beyond his own capacities. No stranger to mystical cosmologies, Pessoa toyed with the idea that his heteronyms were actually existing selves, conscious entities dwelling in a multitiered universe. At least to his own mind, Pessoa’s pursuit of writing unlocked hidden levels of the cosmic architecture. He was given to asking himself such deranging ontological questions as whether his alter-egos were his inventions, or he was theirs — whether he was nothing more nor less than “a series of dreams about me dreamed by someone outside me”.

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Such cases of innovation in literary form facilitating metaphysical discovery are rare but not unheard of. In the mid-Seventies, a few decades after Pessoa’s death, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick underwent a dramatic cosmic revelation (or psychotic breakdown, depending on one’s point of view) that prompted him to declare: “My novels and stories were, without my realising it consciously, autobiographical.” Dick spelled all this out to a dumbfounded science-fiction conference audience in France in a speech with the unbeatable title, “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (it reportedly took his listeners a while to realise Dick wasn’t merely detailing the plot of his latest novel). In the wake of his awed intimations of what today’s physicists tentatively call the multiverse, Dick became avidly interested in religious, esoteric and Gnostic thought, trying for the rest of his life to make sense of his shattering visionary experience.

Pessoa was likewise fascinated by such subjects as would come to preoccupy Dick. He wrote hundreds of poems and pages on esotericism and was fluent in the practices and theories of astrology, seances, Theosophy, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, secret societies, alchemy, and magic. Among the phases of literary influence he passed through was one spent in thrall to the Symbolist movement seeded by Charles Baudelaire, whose doctrine of “correspondences” — “whereby we who walk the world are said to pass through ‘forests of symbols’ that give us ‘knowing looks’” — was indebted to the mystical philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. At the age of 42, Pessoa enjoyed a brief but mutually enriching friendship with the notorious magus and tabloid-favourite Aleister Crowley — a.k.a. the Great Beast 666 — after Pessoa wrote to him offering astrological advice and attaching some of his poems. (Their relationship fizzled out after Crowley visited Lisbon, recruited Pessoa to help him stage his own suicide, and then scarpered to Berlin.) Habitually staying up till the small hours drinking brandy and working on his texts, Pessoa wrote like a warlock-alchemist bent on transforming self and reality.

The cosmological conclusion Pessoa drew from his reading and writing was that there exist multiple levels of reality, and our grossly material, earthbound lives are but shadows of our true being on a higher, more brilliant plane. Although he took a keen interest in his nation’s political life, Pessoa became ever more hermetically devoted to the search for hidden mysteries and secret knowledge — gnosis. A letter he wrote to a young literary acquaintance in the final year of his life offers as clear a statement as any of Pessoa’s spiritual beliefs. In it, he professed his faith in “the existence of worlds higher than our own and in the existence of beings that inhabit those worlds”, and posited “various, increasingly subtle levels of spirituality that lead to a Supreme Being, who presumably created this world. There may be other, equally Supreme Beings who have created other universes that coexist with our own, separately or interconnectedly.” He suspected himself of being guided by higher forces, a mysterious Master or Masters hidden behind the veil of material reality: “Emissary of an unknown king, / I carry out hazy instructions from beyond.” When, like W.B. Yeats (to whom he also wrote letters), Pessoa began conducting experiments in automatic writing, one of the “spirits” who seized hold of his pen told him: “You are the centre of an astral conspiracy.”

Genius, in other words, was a matter of destiny — and Pessoa’s destiny, he believed, was to win in death an immortal glory that would invert his obscurity in his own lifetime. When he was not yet 40, he wrote in a letter to a newspaper (typically left unfinished and unsent): “I feel younger every year because every year I am nearer to having never achieved anything in life… I have never made a real effort after anything, nor applied my attention strongly except to futile, unnecessary and fictional things.” For all his idler’s defiance, Pessoa was not untouched by the sadness of life unlived, of having done little with his existence other than daydream and scribble. In one of his reveries, Bernardo Soares, the heteronym that authored the scraps that make up The Book of Disquiet, recollects in one of his reveries the sense of mystery and wonderment he felt as a child on attending Mass. Soares confides to his diary an admission that, in light of Pessoa’s gnostic intimations of exile from divine origins, is doubly moving: “What I am would be unbearable if I couldn’t remember what I’ve been.”

Pessoa’s greatest outpouring of writings on esotericism occurred between 1931-1934, ending the year before he died. Acquaintances remarked on how, towards the end of his life, preoccupied with mortality, he gave off an otherworldly, mysterious, sage-like impression, as if he was only half here, half already in the beyond. Pessoa’s great Argentine contemporary, Jorge Luis Borges, admitted in old age that he found himself impatient with the mundane concerns of daytime, eager to get back to night with its far more serious business of dreaming. Pessoa — a writer who, had he not existed, Borges might have dreamed up — was likewise a man whose commitment to inaction, dreams, fantasy and the imagination went against the grain of modern life.

Ultimately, the Scottish poet and aphorist Don Paterson was not wrong, I think, when he remarked that the idea of reading Pessoa generally trumps the actual experience. The chief subjects of The Book of Disquiet, tedium and weariness (tédio and cansaço in the Portuguese language which, Pessoa once suggestively observed, has “no bones”), are hardly the most exciting or fertile of literary themes. Still, amid a culture frenzied with productivity and achievement, it’s refreshing to spend time in the company of so orientally inclined a writer, for whom “Action is a disease of thought.” Although Pessoa’s inner world was far richer than the abject Metaverse Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts would have us live inside, aren’t we all, with our multiple online selves and our crowded-lonely worlds of techno-fantasy, living Pessoan lives now? His posthumous renown as Portugal’s great modern poet notwithstanding, it may be that Fernando Pessoa’s real achievement was only secondarily at the avant-garde of literature, and primarily at that of selfhood.

The book’s Wikipedia page contains this pleasing phrase: “Word of mouth and enthusiastic reviews soon catapulted sales to such an extent that Gallimard had to stop publishing the latest Harry Potter novel in order to meet the demand for The Kindly Ones.” Littell was reportedly paid around $1 million for its English translation rights, but when it was published by Harper Collins in 2009 in a translation by Charlotte Mandell, The Kindly Ones met with critical derision and sold a fraction of what its publishers hoped it would. Littell has since faded in prominence from the Anglophone literary landscape (while some of his subsequent books have been translated, they have received little attention and certainly earned no seven-figure advances). Articles by Littell on war and geopolitics occasionally appear in the likes of the Guardian and New Statesman; in March 2022, Le Monde published an open letter in which he urged his “Russian friends” to overthrow Vladimir Putin.

The Kindly Ones is presented as the memoirs of a Nazi SS officer and Holocaust perpetrator who, looking back across decades on his activities during the war, recounts in extreme detail and without contrition his active role in mass murder. Put more succinctly still, it’s a 1,000-page novel about the Shoah told exclusively and exhaustively from a Nazi perspective. It takes in, among very much else, the massacre of almost 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Ukraine (described in a gruesome set-piece that might have sprung from the brain of the Marquis de Sade — an author Littell has translated into English), the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler’s Führerbunker Götterdämmerung, and, inevitably, the death camps. There are cameos or more significant roles for virtually every prominent Nazi, from Höss to Himmler, Mengele to Eichmann, Heydrich to Hitler, along with writers and other cultural figures from the era. The novel’s narrator, Dr Maximilian Aue, begins his account of the war on the Eastern Front, where he served as a member of an Einsatzgruppe (the mobile paramilitary units who carried out the extermination prior to the establishment of the concentration camp network), before rising through the SS ranks to a central administrative role in the bureaucracy of genocide.

Part of what makes The Kindly Ones so extraordinary and erratic a war novel is its very Frenchness. We are accustomed to such thick novels tackling the vast subject of war from within a humanist, Tolstoyan tradition, but Littell is rooted in a contrary, largely Francophone tradition of extreme literature. His forebears are Sade, Bataille, Genet, Céline, and Baudelaire, along with renegade non-Frenchmen such as William Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis (Littell was, in fact, born in the United States — his father was a successful spy novelist — but grew up in France). His infernal narrator is both a committed National Socialist and a severely troubled pervert: page after page describe Aue’s depraved sexual acts and fantasies as the strain of committing atrocities, compounded by his closeted homosexuality and memories of childhood incest with his sister Una, brings on a nightmarish psychic deterioration. Rivers of shit flow through the book, amid corpses and gore, vomit and stench, torture and abjection.

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Surprisingly, in light of his penchant for the transgressive, Littell’s professional background prior to publishing The Kindly Ones in his late 30s was in humanitarian work. Before quitting his job to spend a year and a half researching the Holocaust and travelling in the Eastern Front, he lived in multiple conflict zones as an aid worker for Action Against Hunger — work which provided the insight into bureaucracies and conflict that gave texture to his densely realised novel. Some critics suggested that The Kindly Ones — whose perverse level of detail regarding the minutiae of Nazi extermination mirrors the perversity of the Final Solution itself — reads less as a novel than a work of dramatised documentation.

But Littell, with his arsenal of rogue literary influences, animates his vast knowledge of his subject with the added metaphysical, moral, and psychic dimensions of fiction. As he has somewhat grandly put it in an interview: “You can do things with literature that you’re not allowed to do in other regimes of discourse.” And so we’re presented with such phantasmic images as that of a thundering Adolf Hitler, at a rally Aue attends while his sanity is collapsing, transforming before our eyes… into a rabbi.

Reading Littell’s book last autumn, I found myself having one of those overwhelming literary experiences we’re lucky if we enjoy (though in the present case that may not be the right word) every few years, the kind that had me cancelling social engagements. So absorbed was I that, over the weeks it took me to read the novel, I failed to notice myself sink into a black and choking depression. More accurately, I realised I had become intensely hopeless in my outlook, but somehow (this seems incredible to me now) I failed to connect my reading material to this state of dejection.

Meanwhile, I talked fervently to whoever was around about the amazing novel I was reading, which, I assured them, was both a towering work of literature and as black and punishing a document as I’d ever encountered (strangely, I couldn’t quite convince anyone to read it). When I was 200 pages from the end, a friend and I happened to eat some psilocybin mushrooms. As the effects took hold I felt myself being submerged in the hellish, quicksand imagery and suffocating nihilism of Littell’s novel. The universe was evil — life itself was an infinite gas chamber. When the trip was over I’d made the connection that had previously eluded me, and the following morning the gloom had lifted — I finished the novel in sunlight.

A survey of contemporary Anglophone reviews shows (with some exceptions) an array of critics failing, in various ways, to get it. The most sizeable party dismissed The Kindly Ones for what they decried as its prurient sensationalism that passed itself off as seriousness. Perhaps they were reacting against the hype, their faculties muddied by talk of million-dollar publishing deals and Francophone adulation. At any rate, for me their assessment lands at a neat antipode to the truth — I don’t think I could handle a more serious novel.

The repugnance it induces is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. There’s no way to achieve what Littell is going for here while deferring to delicacy, tact, understatedness. The coprophilia and incest are one thing (there really is too much of that stuff, especially in a chapter towards the end in which Aue masturbates in his own shit for 100 pages), but regarding the gruelling depictions of genocide and atrocity, if Littell ever felt the need to defend himself, he need only remind us: that’s what happened. By committing to a first-person narration, he goes where few if any serious novelists had ever gone and sinks us deep into the psyche of a highly intelligent, cultivated National Socialist — not a fervent antisemite, but an energetic, ambitious, sensitive young man who believes in the necessity of the bloody work his cause demands. Reading the novel is like wading through a dense fog wherein all certainties and moral coordinates vanish.

“What I did,” we read in the first pages, “I did with my eyes open, believing that it was my duty and that it had to be done, disagreeable or unpleasant as it may have been. For that is what total war means: there is no such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between the Jewish child gassed or shot and the German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method.” The Kindly Ones is perhaps best understood as a philosophical virtual reality device that enables us to experience exactly what it’s like to think, feel and act as a committed National Socialist in the inferno of the Second World War.

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Crucially, in depicting the Shoah from the perspective of the perpetrators, Littell — an atheist of Jewish background — cleaves to the truth of the majority, the normal, rather than the exception. Schindler’s List (a film Littell incidentally claims to despise) is beautifully made, heart-wrenching, and deceptive, in that it takes as its subject the moral anomaly: the Nazi who responded to the evils around him by resisting. Most people, of course, did not resist, and even within the SS the overt psychopaths and sadists were in the minority (indeed they were sometimes punished for their excesses). Most Nazi murderers killed without enthusiasm, after finding themselves at the end of a long chain of duties and commands in service to a catastrophic state ideology.

Ventriloquising through Maximilian Aue, Littell wants us to understand that it’s extremely difficult, even arbitrary, to meaningfully separate the culpable from the innocent — in the Nazi genocide and in others. The Kindly Ones’s sinister opening section is addressed to a universal second-person: “If you ever managed to make me cry, my tears would sear your face.” These prefatory pages, in which Dr Aue introduces himself decades after the war while living under an assumed identity — he runs a lace factory in northern France, with a wife and children who are ignorant both of his homosexuality and his wartime deeds — are a warning and a rite of initiation: the hundreds of airlessly intense pages that follow will lock us into the sensorium of a man who was present, lucid, and active in “the heart of the slaughterhouse”.

During this opening address — a précis of the philosophical core that elevates The Kindly Ones above mere atrocity porn or middlebrow historical fiction — Aue makes a further, rarely acknowledged point concerning the nature of war:

“Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, the right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilised human being: the right not to kill. No one asks you for your opinion. In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit.”

Once these unnerving philosophical preliminaries conclude, Littell’s narrator plunges us into the carnage of the Eastern Front in 1941. We are in Ukraine, where the Wehrmacht has driven out the Soviet forces, leaving the native population free to conduct a brutal pogrom against the Jews. The effect achieved here, and over the rest of the novel, is of total immediacy and total visibility — less “show, don’t tell” than “show and tell absolutely everything”. The style is torrential, with sentences typically long and packed with detail, yet remarkably readable (Céline isn’t just an influence — he also makes an appearance).

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Concerns around visibility dog such art that seeks to reckon with the Shoah. Theodor Adorno argued, in a 1962 essay titled “Commitment” (the one with the line about lyric poetry after Auschwitz being barbaric), that: “The aesthetic principle of stylisation… makes an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed. This alone does an injustice to the victims.” Several decades on, the late German novelist W.G. Sebald, whose oeuvre is a sustained exercise in talking about the Holocaust without talking about the Holocaust, remarked in an interview concerning his 1995 novel The Rings of Saturn: “I think it is sufficient to remind people because we’ve all seen images, but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking, for reflecting upon these things, and also paralyse our moral capacity. So the only way one can approach these things in my view is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.”

Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest has won two Academy Awards and much breathless praise for its depiction of the simulacrum of bourgeois normalcy enjoyed by SS commandant Rudolf Höss and his family in a pleasant house on the perimeter of Auschwitz. The horrors of extermination occur entirely off-screen, the ominous sound design intensifying the family’s schizoid reality. My feelings towards Glazer’s film were mixed. I left the cinema curiously unmoved, and although the film’s nightmarish juxtapositions stayed with me, so too did the feeling that there’s something precious, snobbish even, at any rate unsatisfactory and philosophically banal, in this principled refusal to show. By contrast, The Kindly Ones’s opposite strategy of total visibility — total obscenity — challenged and affected me more than an oblique and therefore ostensibly tasteful work probably ever could. Void of redemption and fanatically committed to its subject’s suffocating blackness, the novel terrifyingly describes the world evoked in Nietzsche’s parable of the madman: unchained from its sun, perpetually falling as through an infinite nothing, with more and more night coming on all the time.

In J.M. Coetzee’s essayistic 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, as the titular figure — an elderly and much-garlanded writer — meditates on a novel of Nazi horrors she has read that has left her badly rattled, she considers the word “’obscene’: a word of contested etymology, that she must hold onto as talisman. She chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage.” Costello repeatedly describes having felt, while reading this novel of atrocities, the brush of the devil’s “leathery wing”. The crux of her theologically-inflected argument is that, notwithstanding the Romantic celebration of art’s “heroic right to venture into forbidden or tabooed zones”, no writer can go where the novel’s author has gone and return unscathed — and nor can his readers. The literary encounter with obscene evil, Costello insists, invades, diminishes, and demoralises us. It’s better to look away.

Little wonder that The Kindly Ones was a Francophone sensation and an Anglophone flop — unlike the character Elizabeth Costello, the French have always appreciated being roughed up by their artists and writers. So have I — I need at least some art to assault me like this. But is such a novel — a work that “leaves nothing out”, depicting “scenes that do not belong in the light of day” — ultimately bad for us? Can a book that provoked, at least in me, a dejection so total I hardly even recognised it, really be one that people ought to read?

There’s an oft-quoted remark by Sebald concerning the Holocaust: no serious person ever thinks about anything else. I used to find the line a touch absurd, but as time passes and history’s meat-grinder churns on, it seems to make ever more sense. I finished reading The Kindly Ones shortly before the massacre and torture of some 1,200 Israeli Jews by Hamas on October 7. Together, the novel, that massacre, and the retributive, genocidal crimes against humanity we’ve watched take place in Gaza these past five months (not to mention the atrocities in Ukraine, and other conflict zones I don’t even keep up with), have left me with a sense of the Nazi genocide as being, in some vertiginous sense, the central fact of human history, a catastrophe that stains and alters the meaning of all that came before it and all that follows.

The intoxicating ordeal of reading Littell’s novel left in its wake the feeling that a universe in which extermination took place is, in some ultimate and crushing way, one in which it will always be taking place, where innocence is just guilt that hasn’t yet had a chance to thrive. And this would be true even without the eerie impression that arises from photographs of Palestinian men in their underwear, blindfolded and crammed in the backs of trucks, or of skeletal children being starved to death in real time, of time and space folding in on themselves, of symbols merging, of the victim’s face becoming that of the perpetrator.

Among the questions we may be left asking by both The Kindly Ones and the daily news is how, knowing that such things have happened, and continue to happen, and are happening right now, and knowing too that the good life we enjoy is made possible by the suffering of others, we are able, without recourse to what Maximilian Aue calls “soothing fictions” or the distracting anomalies of righteousness, to live with ourselves. I don’t really have answers. The answer, Jonathan Littell’s novel implies, through the ghoulish image of Aue living his post-war shadow life in France, is simple and dreadful: we live with it by living with it, knowing we’re all guilty and we’re all in hell.

If the 20th century was atheistic, religiosity is now everywhere — I hardly know anyone who lives as a pure-blood rationalist, nor do I encounter many who dwell entirely within one faith or metaphysical tradition. Astrology and occultism flourish in mainstream daylight, while a revived interest in psychedelic experience and synthetic drugs has opened up gnostic wormholes amid the high-res sound-systems of nightclubs that seem more than ever like techno-pagan temples.

Attempting to understand this paradoxical synthesis led me to TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information by Erik Davis, a deeply Californian writer who was born in 1967 but is very much a child of the Nineties. His outlook was shaped as a cultural journalist in that decade he recalls fondly for its “ambient sense of arcane possibility, cultural mutation, and delirious threat that, though it may have only reflected my youth, seemed to presage more epochal changes to come”. He describes TechGnosis as “a secret history of the mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain the Western world’s obsession with technology”, and insists that “religious questions, spiritual experiences, and occult possibilities remain wedded to our now unquestionably science-fiction reality”.

Starting from the maxim that “magic is technology’s unconscious”, Davis explores the myriad ways in which an ostensibly rationalist-materialist-atheist civilisation invests its new machines with ancient animism and archetypal dreams. Think of the recent hype around AI; how ready we are to project sentience and malign — Chtulian! — will onto a technology that, considered rationally, can never possess such qualities. He also considers the ways in which “ecstatic technologies” such as psychedelic drugs, meditation and shamanism now influence and modify questions of the soul, while asking if religious experience, defined by Carl Jung as that in which “man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other”, may itself be evolving in tandem with technocultural mutation.

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The first edition of TechGnosis was published in 1998 — the same year, it’s always startling to recall, in which Google was founded — a prelapsarian time of heady economic growth and triumph-of-liberal-democracy optimism. It’s dizzying to think how much has changed since then, the spree of relentless cultural, societal and technological upheaval we’ve undergone. Yet Davis’s first book has remained relevant (helped by multiple revised editions with updated material). In part this is because it was never fully taken in by the Nineties’ now painfully discredited techno-utopianism, nor did it paint an especially rosy picture of our tech-civilisational future (yes, the one we’re now in). Davis quotes Marshall McLuhan, writing in 1962 about how the Global Village might turn out to be a more uncomfortable place than we anticipate: “As our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside…  we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence.”

Is there a better description of the online mobs, omni-paranoia, mass derangement, moral outrage, scapegoating, and polyphonic extremism that have defined the years since they put devices in our elegantly evolved hands? This sceptical edge may make Davis an appealing writer to those who find other psychedelically informed theorists too far out, too loose and easy with rationalism and the Enlightenment tradition. He is attractively open to gnostic, mystical, religious and, yes, psychedelic experience — a “heady seeker of sorts”, as he describes his younger self — yet he is also cool-headed and rational, even cynical when it comes to the exploitativeness of technocapitalism. Now in his late fifties and a compelling guest on podcasts and YouTube talks (as well as the producer of many excellent articles on his Substack) Davis advocates a “middle way — between reason and mystery, scepticism and sympathy, cool observation and participation mystique”.

His book churns up an unrelenting, often brilliant spray of ideas, funnelling a dizzying range of information across multiple cultural-intellectual byways and minority belief systems. Davis examines the seminal, future-shock cyberpunk fictions of William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), and the gnostic dystopias of Philip K. Dick. But he also ranges onto magical-esoteric-religious history: the Greek-mythic trickster Hermes Trismegistus, John Dee’s “Enochian” magic, the discovery in 1945 of the heretical gnostic scriptures at Nag Hammadi — even the neuroscientist John C. Lilly’s experiments in telepathically communicating with dolphins by way of intravenous ketamine and a sensory-deprivation tank. He traces the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s messianic vision of a noospheric Omega Point — in which all minds are fused in an ecstatic oneness that brings the divine principle to its earthly apotheosis — through the delirious rhetoric of Nineties Wired-era tech propagandists and Singularity hucksters, whose effusions glossed the acceleration into our era of surveillance capitalism, epistemological fragmentation, radical inequality and political extremism.

Davis insists that the digital age teems with religious and supernatural metaphors. His distinction between the analogue “soul” and the digital “spirit” is memorably suggestive: “The analogue world sticks to its grooves of soul — warm, undulating, worn with the pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than corporeality.” It is not lost on Davis that his book appeared shortly before the arrival in multiplexes of The Matrix, an exhilarating film that mainlined the mythos of simulation, alienation, deception and sacred uprising into the global psychic mainstream and perhaps primed teenage minds to plunge into the nightmarish hyperrealities of the decades to come.

He is also sympathetic to the neo-psychedelic culture that emerged from a post-Sixties underground to fuse with a more broadly gnostic cultural mood (you can’t open the New York Times or New Yorker these days without seeing articles on psychedelic research, though acknowledgement of the irreducible weirdness of psychedelics is less common). But Davis regards our connected devices and social media as the real acid in the civilisational punch-bowl: perhaps the ruptures we’ve lived through over the past decade are just the beginning of a cyberdelic horror-trip we’ll never wake up from.

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Ingmar Bergman's moral horror show

By Rob Doyle

Today, the digital future-present keeps echoing the magical-animist-pantheistic past — and vice versa. What are shamans if not “ecstatic technicians of the sacred”, LSD if not a “gnostic molecule”, and Gnosticism itself — the heretical Christian doctrine that declared our universe the botched work of a sinister demiurge, a lesser god — if not “the world’s first metaphysical conspiracy theory”? Meanwhile, the revival of virtual reality and the increasingly realistic texture of video games conjures up the ancient fantasy of simulation and nested realities (“the protagonists of Hindu yarns often found themselves wandering through infinite nests of Borgesian dream worlds”). It is only a short, psychotic leap from there to believing that consciousness is itself a game within a game, that there are levels parallel to or above this one. Even if reality turns out not to be a video game, actual games reanimate gnostic longings. “The boss characters and evil creatures who must be conquered to advance levels are the faint echoes of the threshold-dwellers and Keepers of the Gates that shamans and gnostics had to conquer in their mystic peregrinations of the other worlds.”

At least in its younger form, Davis’s is the sort of intelligence that can barely give itself room to breathe. TechGnosis covers so much ground that you wish he’d linger in one place for a while, probe more deeply into some of the intriguing areas he races over, or make more of the arresting, speculative ideas he frequently dashes out. His book’s enduring cult appeal has arguably made him a touch self-important, assessing (and hyping) its continuing relevance across a series of overlong afterwords. But these are quibbles against the high appeal of a writer so alert to “the powerful, archetypal connections among magic, tricks, and technology”, and the value of psychedelic thought in generating new metaphors. Davis writes of such strange, compelling things with real poetry, his meta-muse unleashed in “those vast cosmic webworks whose own mysterious designs we may glimpse, if at all, in moments past all sense or reckoning”.

Bergman himself didn’t really get going till he was in his late thirties, just as he was leaving youth behind. The 2018 documentary, Bergman: A Year in a Life, pinpoints 1957, when Bergman was 38, as the year when he ascended to the fullness of his mature talent (both The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries were released that year). Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, he turned out masterpiece after masterpiece, working with the same trusted actors: Liv Ullman, Max Von Sydow, Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Anderson, Bibi Anderson, Erland Josephson, Gunnar Björnstrand. It’s telling that when you google Bergman’s best films, none of the lists even closely match up. The quality and consistency of the work he produced across decades resists consensus — everyone has their favourites.

Unsurprisingly, Bergman’s life and appetites match up with his output. The personality that emerges from Bergman’s memoirs The Magic Lantern and Images, and from other accounts of him, is not especially likeable. He wrote The Magic Lantern well into his sixties, but age had not blunted the cruel, petty, vindictive streak he wielded like a weapon against anyone who dared cross him. Recalling a chance encounter in Munich with one of his “most damaging critics” (whom he had previously tried to assault), Bergman can barely restrain his seething hatred: “There goes a Deadly Enemy. He should be destroyed. True, he was destroying himself through his deteriorating writing, but I shall dance on his grave and wish him many eternities in hell, where he can sit and read his own reviews.” In an open letter he wrote to the Swedish authorities in the aftermath of a humiliating tax scandal, he menacingly quotes his hero: “I say as Strindberg did when he was angry: ‘Watch out, you bastard, we’ll meet again in my next play.’” Bergman liked power, and had no qualms about using it for punishment or revenge. Possessing huge natural charisma, he inhabited all too comfortably the role of the ruthless and belittling male genius, trampling on the sensitivities of his underlings, humiliating other men to assert his dominance.

Nor had he any qualms about utilising power’s famously aphrodisiacal qualities on his beautiful female actors — half of Sweden’s talent seems to have belonged to his harem. In Images, there’s a strikingly intimate photograph of Bergman directing the radiant Ingrid Thulin: looming behind her, he cradles her head while murmuring in her ear with his eyes closed like a husband or a horse-whisperer. “Film work is a powerfully erotic business,” he wrote in The Magic Lantern. “The proximity of actors is without reservations, the mutual exposure is total… [T]he atmosphere is irresistibly charged with sexuality.” While some of his children seem to have loathed him or held him in contempt — only three out of eight attended his funeral — the loyalty his collaborator-lovers felt towards him tended to survive the ends of their intimate relationships. In some ways, it isn’t hard to see why they found him so attractive, so worthy of love. Bergman’s desire for women was matched by his curiosity about them — he was able to convey their inner lives with a perceptiveness and accuracy rare among male artists. Key films such as Persona, Cries and Whispers and The Silence have hardly any men in them at all.

But I’d argue that the key Ingmar Bergman film — the one that both unlocks the core of his troubled personality and provides a fascinating meta-commentary on his oeuvre — isn’t one he actually directed. Having announced that he was giving up directing for the cinema after his marvellous, life-affirming 1982 film Fanny and Alexander, in his later years, alone on the island of Fårö, Bergman wrote several highly personal screenplays to be directed by his friends (a control freak to the end, when he could no longer direct, Bergman directed the directing). Among these was Faithless, the lacerating 2000 autofictional drama directed by Liv Ullmann — Bergman’s former lover and enduring friend. In the film, an old man (called “Bergman”) converses with a younger woman whom we quickly realise is an imaginary character from a screenplay he is writing — and a ghost from his past. As the woman tells him her painful story — which is also his own — “Bergman” confronts his shame, guilt, and agony in a narrative that accesses zones of remote psychological darkness rarely breached in film. At the heart of the old man and the woman’s shared story is the adulterous affair they conducted when they were both in early middle-age — and the brutal consequences that ensued.

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Tár and the triumph of amoral artists

By Kathleen Stock

In The Magic Lantern, written well over a decade before Ullmann directed Faithless, Bergman devotes an entire chapter to recounting the episode that would inspire the screenplay. The two versions are identical in all but a few details. It’s as if, in first writing about the affair in his autobiography, Bergman failed to expiate his guilt, and so felt compelled to make a second attempt, this time in a (barely) fictive format. Going on the evidence in Faithless, as well as Bergman’s writings and remarks he made throughout his life, his most ferocious demon was not what he grandiloquently called “the silence of God” nor any such metaphysical concerns, but the more humiliating and private condition of retrospective jealousy — along with the corollary self-loathing he endured, apparently without ever achieving self-forgiveness, over an adulterous affair he conducted in his thirties with a woman named Gun Hagberg (whom he would later marry). While The Magic Lantern discloses only the emotional fallout from the affair, its restaging in Faithless results in suicide, violence, and shattered lives.

Retrospective jealousy — the experience of being tortured not by evidence of a present betrayal, but by intrusive images of sexual pleasure enjoyed in a partner’s past — recurs throughout Bergman’s self-reflections and in his films. In The Magic Lantern he describes this “demonic” form of mental suffering:

“A few years earlier I had been madly in love. Pretending professional interest, I enticed my beloved to tell me in detail about her multifaceted erotic experiences. The peculiar excitement of a fresh jealousy over her long-past actions scratched and tore at my innards and my genitals. The most primitive rituals of shame became a permanent alloy in my jealousy.”

I’d love to know what he means by “primitive rituals of shame”, but what is clear is that retrospective jealousy is very much a director’s affliction — a pathology of control whose essence is curiously metaphysical. To the sufferer, all time exists at once: there is no distinction between past and present. Transient erotic pleasures — and the psychological configurations of power, submission, lust and devotion that underpin them — exist in an absolute and transparent now. Great directors are great dictators: Bergman acknowledged his “inextinguishable need to control reality”, and suffered — horribly — from anything he could not control, including the sexual pleasure of his lovers as it extended into a past when he did not yet know them. Little wonder his actresses sometimes complained of being made to feel like his chattels — Bergman’s tortured conception of sexuality entailed an eternal, spiritual-carnal enslavement.

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The year of the femcel

By Mary Gaitskill

This obsessive conflation of past and present is synecdochic of a broader trend towards collapsed binaries in Bergman’s miscible life and work: art and reality, self and other, persona and actor, pain and pleasure, and especially dreams and cinema are always being run together. To Bergman, everything was cinema, theatre, performance — which is to say it was all dreams, or all nightmares. Love itself was a “bold production” in which ‘the decor was tasteful and the lighting well arranged”, whereas the sweetest dream of all was Bergman’s extraordinary career: “Sometimes I dream a brilliant production with great crowds of people, music and wonderful sets. I whisper to myself with extreme satisfaction: “This is my production. I have created this.”

But just as dream and cinema are analogues, so too are film and guilt, both of which entail the inability to forget. The miracle of film is also that which makes it infernal: the immortality of the filmed image mirrors the claustrophobic nightmare of the guilt- or jealousy-tortured psyche — the horror of the image that can’t be forgotten, the “mercilessly clear picture” whose vividness intensifies until it annihilates:

“There are moving pictures with sound and light which never leave the projector of the soul but run in loops throughout life with unchanging sharpness, unchanging objective clarity. Only one’s own insight inexorably and relentlessly moves inwards towards the truth.”

When he wasn’t tortured by nightmares, dreams for Bergman were a transcendent portal and the standard of his highest artistic ideal. As is true for the greatest artists, dreams were primary and waking life their pale reflection. In later life, Jorge Luis Borges spoke of his impatience for night to come around so that he could immerse in the enigma of dreams; for his part, Bergman insisted “Actually I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality”.

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Bob Dylan has no philosophy

By Geoff Dyer

Among Bergman’s obsessive motifs, dreams are second only to demons — the private demons of jealousy, shame and fear that tortured and stimulated him throughout his life, and the literal demons he summoned in his films, most menacingly in Hour of the Wolf, about an artist on an island who becomes overwhelmed by his terrors. Here again we find the collapsing of borders — between inner and outer, fear and desire, artist and art. The insane painter played by Max Von Sydow encounters his demons in living, corporeal form — and so too does his wife (played by Liv Ullmann), who is apparently sane. Likewise in Bergman’s life, the suspicion emerges that his “demons” are to be taken as metaphors only in a tenuous, provisional sense. “Ghosts, demons and other creatures with neither name nor domicile have been around me since childhood,” he writes in The Magic Lantern (at one point he even describes his penis as a “throbbing demon”, and the humiliating irritable-bowel syndrome that made him shit himself in public as “like housing an evil demon in the most sensitive core of your body”). Later in the book he confides, “Worst are the “hours of the wolf” in the small hours between three and five. That is when the demons come: mortification, loathing, fear, and rage.” In Hour of the Wolf the metaphor becomes psychotically concretised, all too literal.

On first viewing that disquieting, covertly confessional film, I was surprised to find that the solemn Ingmar Bergman had made a horror movie. While I’m partial to the genre, it seemed one too disreputable for the maestro to move in — until it dawned on me that Bergman’s métier was a sub-category which he arguably invented: the moral horror. While Bergman also made comedies, romances and much else besides, he was most at home directing films in this sub-genre within which he also lived, relentlessly vivisecting himself and those around him for the squirming, messy material of his immaculate works. He understood that true horror has little to do with the supernatural or the grotesque and everything to do with the demons, hells and torture chambers of the inner life. Only by directing films could he maintain his sanity “against torments so violent that they became interesting”, and “investigate with interest the torments tearing me to pieces” (how fitting that the first film he ever made was titled… Torment!).

Demons, hell, guilt, torment — it’s hardly surprising that these should constitute the core themes of an artist whose stern, emotionally distant father was a Lutheran pastor, and who grappled with theological doubts into middle age. By his forties, Bergman seems to have rejected religion, and yet the absent God left in its wake a transcendental perception, a structuring sense of the sacred that permeated Bergman’s increasingly compressed, humanist cinema. In the workbook he kept while developing Hour of the Wolf, he describes the inner and artistic breakthrough he had achieved with Winter Light, his mesmerically bleak 1963 film about a country priest staring down the barrels of religious doubt: “The images of God are shattered without my perception of Man as the bearer of a holy purpose being obliterated.”

And several years later, while developing the masterful Persona, he wrote: “Now that God is gone, I feel that all this is mine; piety toward life, humility before my meaningless fate, and love for the other children who are afraid, who are ill, who are cruel.”

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The empty cult of The Big Lebowski

By Matt Feeney

Just as Andrei Tarkovsky has been called a modern-day icon maker whose images infuse a barren epoch with divine luminance, so too might we see Ingmar Bergman’s pellucid, anguished films as something like an expression of post-theistic religiosity. His famous close-ups — of dignified, anguished women and brooding, isolated men — have the clarity of religious paintings. Bergman had the ambiguous gift of seeing into the souls of others: damaged lives are at once exposed and redeemed in his camera’s calm, unblinking gaze. The allusive title of his 1969 film The Passion of Anna is well chosen: all of his characters are crucified, all tormented in their lonely gardens of Gethsemane, all burning in their unique and specific hells.

As I devoured Bergman’s ostensibly bleak films during a period of solitude and self-questioning last winter, no long dark night settled over my soul. All that torment and moral horror did not plunge me into a private hell — but rather uplifted me. To immerse in Bergman’s films is to locate one’s own pain, in all its bitter and unsung specificity, within a redemptive continuum of human distress as ebullient and limpid as a river. His films, ultimately, are a joy — and so it should not surprise us to find Ingmar Bergman insisting in his autobiography on a joy “that had carried me through crises and misery and functioned as faithfully as my heart”. He rightly regarded his films as a source of solace for himself and others, a healing catharsis for his damaged soul in which “Everything is burned clear, and personal growth now becomes a possibility.”